Anyone who worries that Artificial Intelligence (AI) will take over the world either doesn't work with AI or works with it too much; they are a newbie or a nerd.

Forget about world domination; ChatGPT has trouble with even simple tasks. When I ask it to replace placeholders with values it gets confused. It does fine for a while, then starts omitting values or mixing them up.

I've started using an earlier, less "intelligent," version of ChatGPT because it is less likely to start "thinking" for itself. A well-known flaw, in the field they call the tendency of the machine to make things up "hallucinating." I call it lying.

My daughter, who loves to bake, recently had this interaction with AI:

I have a friend, a regular reader of this column, who objects to my popular, critical take on science. To be fair, I am not criticizing science as much as "scientism," the idea that science reveals life's ultimate truths, and that all those truths have a material basis. It seems obvious, at least to me, that history, love, art, and just about everything else worth living for, hold fundamentally non-material truths which will never be revealed by science.

The idea that science might encompass, or AI might dominate, life is a nerdy wet dream, or nightmare.

AI calculates. An algorithm is binary: if this, then that; on/off; yes/no; 1/0. But consciousness is not a calculation. Thoughts are not binary.

If you insert a receiver into the brain and translate the signal into sound, you hear a random, staticky cacophony. Thought, consciousness, creativity, life are stochastic - "randomly determined; having a random probability distribution or pattern that may be analyzed statistically but may not be predicted precisely."

In stark contrast, AI is quiet and precisely predictable. Overly controlled, it does not allow random possibilities. It is not intuitive, imaginative nor creative, qualities which are at the heart of consciousness. Poetry comes closer to describing our experience than does science.

Making science into a religion is a relatively recent phenomenon. Newton, Leibnitz, Einstein et al. were all profoundly spiritual. They understood that science is a toolbox that applies to one segment of experience. Scientism denies the reality of everything beyond the reach of its toolbox: ideals, morality, emotion, consciousness... our most intimate, human experience of reality. All kinds of bad, anti-human tendencies result from using science (or politics or anything else) to fill the "God-shaped hole" that our loss of spiritual ideals has left in society.

On the bright side: There is wisdom in our common experience. The term "common sense" does not refer to truths that are common, in the sense of being ordinary or simple. Common sense refers to an understanding that is held in common, agreed upon by humanity: males are more aggressive than females; state communism fails because it crushes individual initiative.

Crowdsourcing confirms the wisdom of the crowd. At the county fair, when asked to guess the weight of a prize bull or the number of jelly beans in a large jar, the most frequent guess, the most common response, is closest to the actual number.

Artificial Intelligence is another very useful tool in the scientific toolbox, but it is not going to usher in a new world. It is not and never will yield the singularity. Collective Human Intelligence is the true way forward, the positive human future.

Society, working together, is what allowed us to survive: "You go to sleep, and I'll feed the fire. Then, I'll go to sleep while you feed the fire."

Lokkal harnesses togetherness. Collective Human Intelligence is a new source of energy, like hydrogen: "What? You are going to 'burn' water?"

Practically speaking: local internet, combining our local knowledge and experience will produce a better guide (database, search engine, social network...) to San Miguel than Google, with all its money and AI, can ever produce from afar, remotely. Yes, people love to follow their friends and family, to stay in touch with their social network on Facebook. But, also, and just so, they will love to follow their friends and community on Lokkal.

"Thank you, Big Tech, but we will present our own city to the planet."

Now, advertising on Google, Facebook, et al., represents vast amounts of money that are extracted from our community, thereby impoverishing our city. Lokkal, run as a public utility, will keep advertising profits circulating locally, strengthening the local economy, the money enriching another concern each time it changes hands. It's an information economy; let's take control of our information.

We all remember, and miss, the Yellow Pages. Lokkal is that community resource robustly reborn for the digital age.

At the Saturday Market I was introduced to a couple who are visiting San Miguel. She, a business coach, was very outgoing. He, a songwriter/musician, was very, very quiet. Referencing this striking contrast, I got a big laugh out of him, and drew him out, with this joke: How do you tell who is the extroverted scientist? He's the one who is staring at your shoes.

Just as we wouldn't want that introverted musician to plan our party, we don't want asocial nerds to limit what we think, nor scientism to determine how we feel.

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Dr. David Fialkoff presents Lokkal, our local social network, the community online and off, Atención robustly reborn for the digital age. If you can, please do contribute content, or your hard-earned cash, to support Lokkal, SMA's Voice. Use the orange, Paypal donate button below. Thank you.

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