Astrid AI

It’s the AI Industry That’s Autistic

Sam Altman (the Gary Kildall of AI) specializes in mischaracterizing Generative AI technology, promising to create “Artificial General Intelligence” (AGI) Real Soon Now. AGI is supposed to replace humanity with cloud servers and make creative people obsolete.

This goes down great in Silicon Valley salons and the Trump White House.

It’s also bullshit.

AI, like everything else computing has given us, is a tool for expanding what people can do. It won’t replace us any more than a hammer can replace a carpenter.

A better analogy for AI comes in the PBS show Astrid, which debuted in France in 2019. The lead is a severely autistic woman named Astrid Nielsen. She works in the French crime library. She is joined by a police commander named Raphaëlle Coste. It’s one of those “Odd Couple fights crime” shows.

Astrid, as played by Sara Mortensen, is something of an AI. She has the whole library at her fingertips and is brilliant at putting its pieces together to create insights. Her acting and her scenes are incredibly compelling. But she can do nothing without Raphaëlle, in fact she’s completely disabled without a more human, neurotypical partner.

Mortensen’s acting hides the work of Lola Dewaere, whose father Patrick was notable in the 1970s. Dewaere’s may be the better role, because she’s forced to grow, learning Astrid’s strengths and weaknesses, integrating them with her own.

Astrid makes Raphaëlle a better cop, but Raphaëlle was already a pretty good cop. The point is that Astrid needs people who understand her to even live, let alone function.

AI Industry Autism

AI software has no personality. Its growth comes from interacting with its users, expanding their abilities.

The fact that the software appears to have a personality and that its work can be deemed creative doesn’t change the fact that it’s software. The ability to handle tasks involving large databases is not new.

The problem with the AI industry is that it’s focused on creating a super brain, on replacing people, just as the robot industry is now hyper-focused on creating humanoid robots that replace people. In this way it’s the industry that’s autistic.

What the AI industry needs right now is humanity, a proper understanding of its place in the world. America didn’t just make a political mistake with Trump, but a huge technology mistake as well, with enormous data centers meant to render all of us obsolete under the rule of a dementia victim’s prejudices.

It’s up to industry leaders to correct this mistake. While Elon Musk and Peter Thiel may appear to be its leaders, given their role in creating Trump II, they’re not. The leaders in AI are Jensen Huang, Satya Nadella, Sundar Pichai, and thousands of entrepreneurs both here and in Asia. Past iterations of computing, like operating systems, ended with one winner, but the Cloud ended with 5, and AI will end up with more.

Stop with the childish, autistic, win-lose games. Creating win-win scenarios is the way to make AI all it can be. AI may be seen as Astrid, but what AI can be is a team that embraces and enhances our humanity, not replace it.