Anna Lucci ‘28
Staff Writer
“We were intent on making humans more productive; AI and robots could replace us all…I may have to think of the period from the millennium to the pandemic as a heyday when we all became more connected and created the global fund, when we had everyone working together to solve stuff. Now it’s all about yourself. Maybe we have become more selfish and self-obsessed…” said small business owner (tech tycoon) Bill Gates during an interview with columnist Alice Thomas of The Times of London for a piece entitled “Bill Gates: Trump, Musk and how my neurodiversity made me.”
Prior to reading this article, I had mentioned to my boyfriend — a brilliant software engineer, that I was entirely of the opinion; that the human capacity for intelligence, if allowed, and allotted the proper funds to be, could far surpass any A.I. model in existence today, and any to come. This “mentioning” on my behalf, came in the form of a fiery facetime five-o-clock feud, and so back and forth we went for 15 minutes, until it was suddenly midnight. Then, much to my love’s shagrin, Saturday arrived, which meant I would finally have some quality time with some of my favorite news outlets, to see what the professionals had to say on this tension-filled topic. So the pouring of the coffee, and the putting on of the cozy sweatshirt, and the sitting down at the desk — chair unfolded, and finally, the opening of the laptop. Immediately scurrying onto the New York Times main interface, as any wise-minded individual does with a cup of coffee on the weekend, when an article caught my eye; “A Billionaire’s Biggest Regret: Letting an Old Love Slip Away”. And so I thought, “a love-themed article, how weekendy, and pertinent to my lover’s quarrel — let’s give it a read”. I managed past the first quote in the New York Times article, and then proceeded to click the hyperlinked word, to find out what brilliant act of journalism that was being referenced by the NYT, managed to encourage the notoriously-neuro-diverse billionaire to expose his inner-feelings on the open web — when I sourced the Times of London piece.
This quote stirred in me a sense of resolve, as my opinion had been endorsed by Bill Gates — whose name alone ensured a marked victory over my boyfriend’s sorely misplaced allegiance to AI. However, although a brilliantly written article about the biography of Bill Gates’s life, the quote alone, prompted me to brainstorm. Given the recent super-ascendance of tech-trillionaire-triad Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerburg (as C.E.O. of Meta — for all you annoying fact-checkers out there), Elon Musk…Ilya Sutskever, Mira Murati, Greg Brockman, Steve Ballmer, Michael Dell, Larry Page…okay so perhaps not “triad” in the traditional sense, but it’s Valentine’s Day, there’s enough love to go around! Anyways, before these people made enough money to invest in their own code to make more money, minimize global debt, and purchase whole countries (yes — in that order) and all of the other silly (not-so-little) things tech tycoons do to express love, to their one true love-money, they could have invested in education. I know it sounds trite, but in truth, all of the money spent on generative and non-generative AI models, could have been spent improving the quality of our world’s math programs, English programs, history programs…could have been used to incentivize reading, to encourage good study habits, a strong work ethic, communication skills, executive functioning etc…
Now you’re probably wondering to yourself, “why even raise this argument…and oh her poor boyfriend.” Well, the answer to the first question is that we constantly read about the landmark improvements AI is making to the medical industry, our defense forces, our archival and digitization databases, but we never stop to consider that if it’s true, that AI is catching the uncatchable tumor, and the rare-disease, and slowing down the metastasization of cancer cells, and locating our foreign and domestic enemies faster — aren’t those just immense human intelligence gaps? What if instead we raised our world’s standards of education, and expected these same immaculate outcomes from human beings — who were being invested in so that they could mathematically achieve these same outcomes — would we still need AI? Now this isn’t to say that investing in human-engineered technology is a net-negative, but it is to say that with proper investment, if anything is possible, why not a human intelligence net-positive? Humans have the capacity to catch diseases at faster rates, to catch our enemies more effectively, but the sooner we give up on the ideal of human intelligence, and prioritize the intelligence of robots, or computers, or the intelligence of “the few” (Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerburg, Sam Altman — given my recent fondness for Bill Gates I am not lumping him in to this parenthetical) we give up on the prospective ability of the multitude to achieve the immaculate. Now software engineers will say that humans are prevented by their bodily ability, their literal capacity to see, hear, smell, touch…identify a tumour with their eyes on a printed radiology assessment, but I disagree. I think that if we really want to achieve magnanimity, I agree with Bill Gates that humans are worth investing in. Starting to ask questions like, “how do we improve human eye sight, how do we run faster, how do we innovate without aiming at the objective of compensating for human laziness”? I insist the solution isn’t a communist state, with national demands on the private health of humans. And for all those that watched Lucy, starring Scarlett Johansen, I don’t think it’s quite that either. I think that if it’s true that we humans only use roughly 11.1% of our brains, the 89.9% frontier is ready for human investment and exploration. I think it’s about somehow reminding the human population that from the caveman’s discovery of fire, to the Covid Vaccine, we humans have got ourselves this far. So “it’s definitely not you AI, it’s the possibility of me.”
Featured image courtesy of Financial Times
Web Edited by Zexuan Qu ’28
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