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The Predictable Irrelevance Of Artificial Intelligence
Why the latest Great New Frontier simply presages more of the same
Our entire modern world is constructed upon the cumulative foundations created by a tiny fraction of humanity. Consider the ubiquitous smartphone: the software engineers who code the operating systems and applications that sit on top have little understanding of the physical devices upon which their endeavors depend. Likewise, those who construct the codecs that packetize and transmit the bytes that ultimately generate pixels or audio signals have little knowledge of such things. And the people who engineer the fiber-optic cables that are the ultimate backbone likewise have little knowledge of everything else. Specialization permits marvels, but even the cleverest people see only a small portion of the overall picture.
Meanwhile, everyone else is simply an ape stroking a flickering shiny screen with zero comprehension of even the most basic aspects of the device they hold and gawp at for hours each day.
So, given the general propensity toward ignorance and simplicity, it’s hardly surprising that one extremely repetitive human trait is to take new things and purpose them toward old ends. When metallurgists learned to create bronze, one of the very first and most persistent uses was to fashion…
