“Covered wagon, Medicine Show
Take you to a place where the healing flows, oh-ho
Weak in spirit we got the juice
Won’t save your soul it’ll shine your shoes, oh
Treated king to kangaroo
Santa Fe to Timbuktu, oh-ho
Don’t be fooled by imitation
This is the stuff that cured a nation”
Jones/Williams/Letts
Last Saturday afternoon I had a terribly freaky experience.
We’ll get back to that.
On Friday I’d had a wonderful experience. My great friend Shane was travelling through Monaghan on his was to a gig… he’s a popular psychologist and gives talks to ease furrowed brows. I was going to say he’s a psychologist, not a pop star…but he was a pop star once. Admittedly , like may pop stars, his ascension was brief, but glorious. His career as the Paul Simon to Milo’s Art Garfunkel in the ballad duo, Rain, lasted between October and Christmas 1983.
Shane was a year older than Milo and I and left school the next year to become a priest. Well a diocesan priest, which is Junior B, rather than the senior hurling that is the missionary priesthood. Milo followed him a year later, and I joined the Holy Ghosts.
We chatted about that. How sometimes we miss that certainty of faith. We have, individually, found a spirituality, which I think is more akin to a sense of wonder, and marvel. We share the same opinion on organized religions and yet we both still pray, and we both still pop into churches and light candles for people and their intentions.
We chatted about music. Shane has an incredible record collection…some of which aren’t bad.
We chatted about family and friends.
And then oddly we got on to AI, which now means Artificial Intelligence, and not artificial insemination, which it always has…. if you live anywhere near a dairy herd. Among the many things in life Shane and I share, a healthy disregard for anything that removes humanity from anything else, is up there. We’d both experienced it recently. My brother John seems enamoured with it and had shown me horrendous things he’d asked it to write. And Shane had had the misfortune of asking it to review his poetry.
The Famous Douglas Adams quote from The Salmon of Doubt sprung to mind :
“I’ve come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”
Like all those great quotes, it sprung to mind after our lunch had finished and I was in the car driving back to the place that employs me.
Anyway, although our attitude to AI fits perfectly into Douglas Adams rules, we have embraced the internet, social media, and robot lawn mowers, it’s just the soullessness of AI that irks and terrifies us.
Our lunch became a two hour chat, and but for his later speaking engagement, would happily have led to an afternoon pint or two, and possibly dinner.
Next time.
The following morning I was up and out early setting up the route for Ireland’s friendliest and most gorgeous Parkrun , out in Rossmore Park, and was joined by my good friend Dominic. We chatted as we walked the route. Chats with Dominic are a lot like Mrs.Gump’s box of chocolates, you never know what you’re going to get.
Before I go any further I’d like to let you know that I have a Bubba Gump Shrimp baseball cap…well technically Jake has it now, and that I always cry at the end of Forrest Gump. Proper cry too, not sniffles, proper heaving chest and tear snorts.
Anyway Dominic and I chatted about Ray, marathons, Palestine, Sligo, Shane Martin, faith and AI. The chats weren’t necessarily in that order, but we definitely finished on AI. I’d said that some people at work, i.e. my brother John was enamoured with it, but that it left me cold. I saw somewhere online where some artist had written “I thought that this technology would do the laundry and clean the toilets, not do art and write, meaning the only job I get is to do laundry and clean toilets !”. Dominic wasn’t scared by it. And that scared me. Dominic always seems to know more about these things than he lets on. But we’d arrived back at the starting line so I didn’t press him on it.
Ray and I headed off on our last long training run before the marathon and it all went out of my head. Everything goes out of my head when I’m on a long run. I can either think or breathe. I always opt for breathing.
On Sunday morning I got a message from Dominic.
“I didn’t read your blog this week, instead I podcasted it….I think it’s very interesting. If you have 8 minutes while you chill this morning, see what you think.”
There followed a link to something.
As you’d expect I couldn’t figure out to open it, and told Dominic , so he then sent me a download, which I could open.
It was shocking.
It was two Yankees chatting about the blog I’d written last Friday. They laughed at each other’s jokes as they critiqued mine. It took me a full two minutes to realise that there were no two Yankees chatting, it was an AI programme that Dominic had entered a link to my blog into it and asked it to review it in the style of a podcast and this was the result. If we hadn’t been chatting about AI the previous day I would have assumed that it was two real live Yanks chatting about how wonderful and insightful my blog was.
The only thing that gave it away was that it was too complimentary, never used my name, and the laughs were falser than a Newstalk breakfast duo’s.
But it was alarming. Especially in light of last week’ s Nobel prize winner, Geoffrey Hinton’s warning that the overall consequence of AI may be systems that are more intelligent than us and take over. And he should know , he’s widely regarded as the godfather of AI !
My only comfort is that the AI industry will inevitably follow the path of everything else and when the opportunity of a quick buck appears we’re flooded with Snake Oil salesmen that eventually ruin it.
“Snake oil salesmen , Paul “
Yes ,,
Snake oil first entered popular culture in the US in 1860 when Chinese railway workers applied an oil to their aching limbs in the evenings for relief. Enterprising Yankees soon started to copy this idea and sell ‘Snake Oil’ as a cure all elixir.
They were soon selling so much that rattle snakes became harder and harder to find , at one point commanding a price of $40 before an equally enterprising Yankee set up a snake farm.
The most famous snake oil salesman was Clark Stanley who would attend fairs and circuses around the country and dramatically plunge his hand into a sack of rattle snakes , plucking out one and slicing it from head to tail and throw it into a VAT of boiling water before scraping the resulting fatty oil off the top, bottling it and selling it to the frenzied mob.
Snake Oil was successfully sold as a medicine in the US until 1917 when federal authorities impounded a batch of Mr. Stanley’s oil and having examined it they discovered it contained :
- Mineral oil
- Camphor and turpentine , to give it a medicinal smell
- Red peppers, to give you the feeling of warmth when applied
- 1% of an indeterminate animal fat, but definitely not snake
This revelation led to the collapse of the snake oil industry and the adoption of the term ‘snake oil’ to refer to something sold under false pretences.
The thing was though that the snake oil that the Chinese railway workers used did contain snake oil, but it was from the Chinese water Snake, not the rattle snake. The Chinese Water Snake eats a diet of fish so it actually has a higher Omega-3 oil count than salmon and did actually give relief to their aches and pains.
So, I think that there is something intrinsically good and beneficial in AI, but that this is all being corrupted by ‘snake oil salesmen’ applying it to everything and anything to cash in. This wave will crash on the shore and , hopefully, we will be left with something that is useful…and may do the laundry, and clean the toilet.
But what would I know ?
Toodles,
Paul
P.S. For all the bots out there, this is Medicine Show
