Dear Editor, 

Last week, I wrote about some of the negative aspects of the new computer-driven phenomenon known as AI. While it is artificial, it is not a substitute for intelligence. The annoying results we often see come from people lazily employing AI, but not fact-checking the result before publishing. When it’s used on photos, it sometimes distorts subjects, altering their faces, giving them six fingers or elbows that bend backwards. Voicebots often pause in the wrong place or mispronounce words, and they don’t know how to read dates. It’s up to the humans who employ them to catch and correct those mistakes. If they are not corrected, the hyper-algorithm “learns” that is OK.

Advanced computing has been used to good effect, in clarifying the sound and video recordings of the Beatles’ Get Back. It allowed us a cleaner view of an actuality 60 years ago. 

This technology has been applied to deciphering the symbolic carvings on the stone pillars of Göbekli Tepe, and has allowed archaeologists to recognize that they were not random decorative pictures, but rather a timeline charting cyclical astronomical events. The timeline has been matched with known climate change data, and has proven to be quite accurate. 

We began using computers to gain leverage on tasks we already knew how to do, but now we are required to change our lives to fit into cubbyholes for the convenience of the bureaucrats who want us all to be interchangeable units of governance. My Neanderthal heritage rejects that trend. 

I must reiterate that the most alarming aspect of the AI phenomenon is that the data centres necessary for the matrix to function create an ecological disaster in the making. Don’t let a billionaire corporation talk you into sacrificing your air and water for the convenience of the shareholders. Reclaim your humanity, your right to make and correct your own mistakes, and to think like an upright hominid.   

Robert Wills, Shawville and Thorne