Advice for Elon

Why you should come up with a new label for 'AI' and who you should talk to next

Hello Elon!

This is a letter I never expected to have the temerity to write, let alone publish. And it’s a foregone conclusion that you will never read it. Why should you take seriously an 82-year-old writer living on the margins whose comprehension of ‘AI’ might be fairly general? I’ll tell you why: it’s often the people who are on the outside of something who can see it clearly while the people on the inside, like you, are so entangled that they cannot leap outside its defining parameters. And you seem like a troubled man. So I thought I would offer you some unusual advice on how to deal with what you call ‘Artificial Intelligence’ or AI.

Besides that, you should know that I’m furious, like a lot of writers waking up to the already infamous ChatGPT. Your invention is threatening to ruin the lives of most mid-level writers, artists, film makers and others in so called service jobs. Had it been invented when I was still working at various writing, translating and editing jobs—I would have been out of those jobs pronto. Today, the Chat thing will throw a lot of people on the slag heap of history. I feel for them.

It’s all done above board, mind you. When you read something ‘written’ by the ChatGPT, it tells you not to confuse it with whatever humans do when they think. Here is a self description, as ‘author’ of a rather humdrum article listing BC’s wealthiest people, all men:

ChatGPT can understand and respond to natural language, making it a valuable tool for tasks such as language translation, content creation, and customer service. While ChatGPT is not a sentient being and does not possess consciousness, its sophisticated algorithms allow it to generate text that is often indistinguishable from that of a human. (my bolding)

Okay. The damage is already done. But then you have the gall to muse aloud to Tucker Carlson about inventing yet another AI thingy that will be programmed to search for The Truth. Wow. You clearly have no clue about how incredibly arrogant that statement is. You really need to get out more, Elon. Like maybe read some people who know other things. Things you don’t know. About the difference between right and left brain takes on the world and what that means. Please, read the reigning sage of neuroscience philosophy, Dr Iain McGilchrist. You need him, you really do. I suggest you arrange a meeting because he can show you a way out of the black box of AI programming into a wider world of humanity freely exercising its God-given imagination.

But before we get into that, let’s talk about the label ‘AI’. Naming things is a creative act, as I’m sure you know. Getting the language right is rather crucial, don’t you agree?

Calling it ‘Artificial Intelligence’ implies that this ‘thing’ is equivalent to our own, human intelligence. And that it therefore could develop a ‘will’ of its own. This is pure nonsense. I assume that even techies are smart enough to build in an off switch so that doesn’t happen. We are the creators here; never forget. Marshall McLuhan is as relevant as ever in this discussion. His fundamental insight that all our technologies are extensions of our body functions still holds. AI is the extension of a particular kind of rationality, the kind that ‘lives’ in the left brain. Its chief function is to focus, order and grab information for the purpose of control and survival. Numeracy and literacy are both at home in the left brain and are obviously important. Without them, we would not have civilization.

However, this type of rational intellect is not and should never be mistaken for Intelligence itself. And it should not be in charge. Human Intelligence is not limited to the intellect, but in the current discussions about AI, you would never know that there’s more to it. And the only public intellectual who has taken this seriously is Iain McGilchrist. His brilliant, deep analysis of the other aspects of human intelligence—imagination, intuition, context, and faith—are timely, urgent, and most illuminating.

McGilchrist’s point about ‘falling in love with the least important part of our mind’, namely the rational intellect, bears repeating. As the reigning brain function philosopher, he warns us about the left brain’s narrow-minded self-righteousness inability to comprehend the big picture, to see context and meaning. The current “AI” models may simulate human language, but never forget that it is a simulation.

It is not language the way humans use and understand it at all. There is no moral or physical context to what the Chat Bot is spewing out; it is a simulacrum, a deep fake of real human language. To me, its real danger is that we get so mesmerized by this deep fake that we begin to believe it is equivalent to human thinking and reasoning. When you can get this technology to ‘write’ an essay or pass bar exams, what’s not to like? Exactly. It’s handy and far more efficient than our slow minds so we get entranced by its ‘efficiency’, one of the primary drivers of the left-brain view of the world. What price efficiency? You tell me.

I think it’s normal to believe that you should ‘control’ it. The paradox is that only by letting go of the idea of control as understood by left brain bureaucrats and technocrats can you take the entire discussion into the right brain. There it can be integrated into a moral, intuitive, value-based system we have long eschewed. And it is only in that realm that we might finally ask the most important question: What is the ultimate objective of ‘AI’? Why are we doing this? Have we even considered it? What’s it all about, Elon? We may have to invent an entirely new language to answer that question. This isn’t an easy thing for engineers, nerds, and other math geniuses to do. But if we don’t make that leap, we will never get out of the trap of our left brain, which only knows how to go in the same direction, indefinitely. It cannot and will not change course without intervention from the right brain. And we need an intervention.

As McGilchrist has tirelessly demonstrated, left brain attention is incapable of seeing context, meaning and value. And it’s only through putting AI into a moral context that we’ll ever be able to live with it in harmony. We are not inferior machines, or as one of the pioneers of the Internet, Jaron Lanier, insisted, You are not a gadget. The human brain is NOT like a giant computer at all. This is a crucial distinction. Believing that we humans are poorly made machines in need of fixing leads to some dark places. You know what I mean.

If human intelligence is nothing but mathematical calculation, then AI is indeed a new god that we must worship. But that is a false assumption. What it does is so far removed from actual thinking as done by embodied humans that there is no equivalency. To truly comprehend what we’re dealing with you need a basic course in neuroscience and familiarity with the right brain/left brain philosophy of Iain McGilchrist as laid out in his ground-breaking book with the odd title The Master and his Emissary. Republished in 2019, its main theme is that a society that ignores right brain functions like imagination, intuition, context, faith, morality, and the body is literally destroying itself.

He describes such a society in some detail and alas; it is us he described back in 2009 when the book was first released. This is a feat of pre-cognition so stunning I am always shocked when I discover that most people have not read this book. Admittedly, it’s demanding, but so is thinking about ‘AI’. And once you have read it, the discussions about AI take on a different significance because you’re seeing AI through the lens of the right brain.

McGilchrist agrees with Einstein, who once said that imagination is the most important aspect of our human intelligence. In this society, it continues to be confused with fantasy, and therefore dismissed. Yet it is only by taking our current dilemmas about ‘AI’ into the context of the right brain that we will discover a way out of a left-brain trap of our own devising. ‘AI’ is the perfect creature of our power-mad left brain, which is currently running the entire human show.

For a wonderfully nuanced discussion of what imagination is and what its role in human affairs ought to be, you can’t do better than to tune in to Dr McGilchrist chatting with a brilliant young scientist named Phoebe Tickel. It seems to me that every technocrat, every scientifically oriented person on this planet should listen to this discussion and take it in. Just think about it, please, because it is vital to our very survival.

And once you have done that, please back away from the fear based, control obsessed idea that ‘government agencies’ working with the tech bros should be put in charge of the future development of ‘AI’.

You can’t possibly believe that is a good idea. Have you already forgotten the awful, criminal mess ‘government agencies’, working hand in glove with Big Pharma, made when confronted by a new virus? When our elected representatives panicked and instead of following well-understood practices and pandemic protocols, proceeded to wreck or lives and the economy with oppressive lockdowns, useless mask mandates, and very effective fear propaganda about refusing or just having doubts about a new ‘vaccine’. BTW, the importance of labels was demonstrated when the new gene therapy was re-categorized as a ‘vaccine’ because they understood that it could not meet the high threshold set by the regulators. For some reason, vaccines, especially experimental ones, do not have to rise to that threshold. So you should be very careful about advising us to trust our politicians with yet another new tech toy. They can’t hack it and have proven that repeatedly.

But in spite of all that, we apparently have to ‘do something’ and The Economist has a plan about control and oversight. Here is an excerpt of a recent editorial on controlling the AI spectre:

What to do? The light-touch approach is unlikely to be enough. If AI is as important a technology as cars, planes, and medicines—and there is good reason to believe that it is—then, like them, it will need new rules. Accordingly, the EU’s model is closest to the mark, though its classification system is overwrought, and a principles-based approach would be more flexible. Compelling disclosure about how systems are trained, how they operate and how they are monitored, and requiring inspections, would be comparable to similar rules in other industries. 

Perhaps they are right and I am wrong, but for me, it’s quite jarring to hear the supposedly smartest people in the room suggesting that we should trust the same corrupted officials to police yet another new technology they only dimly comprehend. And equating AI with other technologies like cars and medicines is already a false equivalence. It’s nothing like that. What could possibly go wrong? Asking for government oversight of a technology that is outsmarting its own creators seems like deciding to put the hens in charge of the fox den. And that’s going to work just fine?

It will end badly, as it did with the pandemic. There can be no doubt that when you task bureaucrats, all of them left brain dominant, with managing technology they don’t understand, terrible things happen. Just imagine how panicked they will be when trying to ‘control’ brilliant techies who speak a foreign language. Good luck with that.

It’s not hard to see that it’s going to be worse this time around because even you apparently do not fully comprehend how your creative ‘AI’ does what it does. That is indeed frightening and evokes the old tale of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, whose message is that when you play with powerful magic, you had better be the master, not the clueless apprentice, who doesn’t know how to stop the magic. So, perhaps calling for a half year stop to heedless development is good. But after that, what? I put it to you, Elon: We have to invent a new language to come to grips with ‘AI’.

At the 2022 international AI conference where he was the keynote speaker, McGilchrist basically begs his audience to take the left-brain definition of ‘intelligence’ over into the right brain where it encounters context, meaning, imagination, faith, and intuition, thus preventing it from doing immeasurable harm. He is the only public thinker who paints this nuanced version of what human intelligence is and how it differs from machine intelligence. When listening to him, it seems obvious that our choice of terminology was our first mistake.

In conclusion, Elon: you above all should listen to this. And when you have done that, you will realize the utter futility and madness of expecting a left-brain product like ‘AI’ to discover something that is the prerogative of the right brain; which is knowing what truth might be at any given moment.

No machine can ever discover what ‘Truth’ is. The great Truths are revealed to us in a complex process not always accessible in explicit language. It can only be expressed in parables and metaphor. You may have heard the parable about meeting the Buddha on the road. If you meet him, you have to kill him because he is not the real Buddha. It’s like that with the Truth: it is a creative process, not an end point and as such, not accessible to a machine based on mathematics and rationality. You have no choice but to embrace the central fact of human life, namely that it is governed by paradox. The more we try top down control, the more it eludes us. And you.

If you have the humility to admit that you, and indeed all of humanity is not God, then you can truly save us from ourselves and the calcified bureaucrats waiting to ‘police’ the creative genius of mankind. This cannot and should not be done. I also believe it is by its very nature, impossible. So. Get your humble on and start again.

Good luck, go talk to McGilchrist, and I will be watching.

Sincerely

Monika Ullmann