“Sorry, I’m Not a Human, I’m A Computer”

by James Wallace Harris, 3/10/24

What will happen if we all end up embracing artificial intelligence (AI)?

My friend Linda told me a funny story today. Her robotic vacuum cleaner was acting up, so she called its tech support number. The tech immediately started telling her how to troubleshoot the problem, but Linda had to tell her to hold on a minute.

Linda went off and gathered up her robot. When she came back, she said, “I’m sorry I took so long, I didn’t expect you to fix it right away.”

The tech replied, “That doesn’t matter, I’m a recording.”

Linda said the computer spoke perfectly and told her exactly what to do. She was shocked by how well the call went.

At first Linda and I joked about this incident, thinking up funny scenarios that standup comics could create about humans interacting with artificial intelligence machines.

I even thought I would try to write up some of those humorous ideas, but then I started thinking along a different track. What if people prefer getting phone help from an AI rather than real people? For years now everyone I know has complained about how hard it is to get any kind of support over the phone. Most folks hate phone trees. Many acquaintances complained they couldn’t understand phone support from foreign call centers. And everyone seems to think it’s almost impossible to get a human on the phone.

What if AI chatbots change all that? What if computers start giving us perfect service over the phone, the kind we used to think humans provided? No one wants humans to lose jobs to automation, but what if we end up preferring the AI voice over the human voice?

How far will that acceptance go? It’s one thing to want to get help from Amazon when your return doesn’t fit any of the listed reasons on the website. But what about more sophisticated support over phones? Would you choose to pay $20 an hour to talk to an AI psychiatrist over Zoom or $100-300 an hour to human psychiatrist in person? What if the cheap AI psychiatrist helps you become happier sooner?

Right now, AI chatbots aren’t factually trustworthy. What if they were? What if it was impossible to tell the difference between AIs and humans by talking to them over the phone? Synthetic voices are getting closer to sounding human. But with AI generated video, soon chatbots will be able to talk and look like a human over video calls too. What if AI chatbots could pass the Turing Test? Will you care? Remember that old New Yorker cartoon showing two mutts with the capture, “On the internet no one knows you’re a dog.”

Already people are using chatbots for friendship. I imagine they will soon offer phone sex talk if they don’t already. Will Only Fans users care if they see AI generated nudity rather than video images of real people?

We must ask, what do we really want from other people?

I’ve been watching the excellent limited series Feud on Hulu. The first season was about the feud between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. The second season is about Truman Capote and how he ruined his friendship with several New York society women he called his swans. On the surface, the show is about famous conflicts, but below the surface it’s about hurt. It’s about what we want from friends, and why we don’t get what we want, which is recognition and support.

How often are you disappointed with technical or business phone support because the offered solution didn’t recognize your individual problem or solve it? What will happen to society if AI chatbots see deeper into our souls and give us more support than other humans? Will we let millions go unemployed?

This whole AI thing is going to be a lot more complicated than anyone ever imagined.

JWH

“At some point in your childhood, you and your friends went outside to play together for the last time, and nobody knew it.”

by James Wallace Harris, 3/4/24

My cousins and I on my mother’s side of the family occasionally exchange emails. There were sixteen of us first cousins, from five sisters. There are only nine of us left, and all the sisters have passed on. Recently, we’ve been talking about our memories of my grandmother’s house. The house was out in the country, near the little town of Enid, Mississippi.

I only have one memory of that house. I think it was from 1968, but I’m not sure. I believe my mother, along with one or two of my aunts, I’m thinking it was Aunt Let, but maybe Aunt Sissy was with us too, and maybe even a couple of my cousins, all went to see the house. By then it was abandoned and run down.

I stole the title of this essay from a meme I saw on Facebook. I wish I knew before I visited the house what I’ve learned from my cousins’ memories in their emails. I wish I had been shown the photos of the house before that visit. I would have asked all the questions I had to my mother, her sisters, and my cousins. Some of my cousins were even born in the Enid house.

Why are memories more emotionally intense now in old age, than the original experience that created them? I wish I could save all my memories perfectly. I wish I could copy my cousins’ memories into my memory bank.

I recently reread Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut. His protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, became unstuck in time, so he randomly popped in and out of all the moments of his life. I wish I could do that. Billy was also abducted by aliens from Tralfamadore. They didn’t experience time like we do. They didn’t experience moments one after another, but all at once. I wish I could do that sometimes, to be shown the big picture. It might have helped me always understand the small moments better.

Lastly, I’m reminded of the film Blade Runner, and the “Tears in the Rain” speech given by Roy Batty just as he’s dying.

I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe… Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion… I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain… Time to die.

When I and all my cousins die, all our memories will be lost. Susan and I don’t have children to pass on our memories. And I’m not even sure my cousins’ children can tune into what my cousins felt about their lives. My father died when I was eighteen, and I never talked to him much about his past. My mother lived to be ninety-one, and I did talk to her, and she told me a lot, but I never felt it the way I feel my own memories.

In the decades since my parents died, I’ve tried to imagine their lives from the clues they’ve left. Too bad we weren’t a race of telepaths because I don’t believe words are ever enough.

I believe this photo is the last time all sixteen cousins were together. I wish I remember that day better too. (I’m on the far left.)

JWH

Will People Change vs. Can People Change?

by James Wallace Harris, 2/28/24

I just finished listening to The Deluge by Stephen Markley, a book that speculates on what the next sixteen years could be like. The book is almost nine hundred pages in print, and over forty hours on audio. Reading this book feels like it’s compressed the last twenty years of polarized political conflict into a forty-hour long disaster film. It’s intense.

Markley uses a large cast of characters to dramatize how people on the left and right will battle for control over the next five U.S. presidential election cycles. Most of the story involves two groups of characters, those working within the political system, and those who decidedly don’t. Markley portrays an ultrasecret ecoterrorist group that works to force change by violent acts versus a dedicated group of political wonks that labor in Washington to influence both parties. Dynamic women characters lead both groups. (By the way, I disliked both women. The only character I cared about was a drug addict in Ohio, who Markley uses as a kind of everyman.)

To further spice up the story, Markley explores the growing power of computer surveillance, artificial intelligence, privacy, and how everyone can be tracked.

I’m not going to review the details of The Deluge because I want to use my reading experience to talk about a specific response to reading the book. I’ll link major book reviews at the end in case you’re considering reading the book. I can say liberals will be terrified by the conservatives in this story, and conservatives will by horrified by these fictional liberals.

The Deluge is about climate change. We could have solved that problem by now if we had acted promptly twenty years ago. The government could have added a tax on all fossil fuels and then raised it slowly month by month. For example, by adding ten cents to the federal tax on gasoline each month. If we had started this in the year 2000, gasoline would be approaching $30 a gallon today. That would have forced people and corporations to make the changes needed.

That tax revenue could have been used to overhaul the power grid and for developing renewable energy technologies. If we had taxed carbon properly, we wouldn’t be fighting over climate change today. That didn’t happen. It didn’t happen because the people who owned trillions of dollars in fossil fuel reserves made sure it didn’t happen. They built a political and religious coalition to fight with them to protect that wealth.

All that’s beside the point now. What Markley envisions is the breakdown of the United States over the next sixteen years so it’s obvious to all we need to do something. The Deluge includes dramatic scenes of a massive fire that destroys Los Angeles, a massive flood that overwhelms the Midwest, and a massive hurricane that devastates east coast states. These events caused the insurance industry to collapse, leading to economic chaos. Markley doesn’t overplay all this. His fictional disasters are realistic, only somewhat larger than what we’ve already experienced, killing just hundreds or a few thousand people in each event, but having an enormous impact on politics and the economy.

Reading The Deluge makes readers ask themselves: Will American change soon? But I ask: Can people change at all?

Before reading this novel, I had seen two insightful videos about climate change that ask the same questions. The first video makes a careful case saying people don’t change and if there is a solution for avoiding climate change it must work with the psychology of how people act. The second video summarizes the first video with impressive summations of it and this tweet. (I wish I could summarize what I watch and read this well.)

Over the two hundred thousand years that our species have existed on this planet, we haven’t changed. Our societies and technologies change, but not us. Over those two hundred thousand years we have developed four major cognitive tools to understand reality: religion, philosophy, mathematics, and science. Only science using mathematics has consistently proven it can consistently describe reality. If you don’t believe that I wouldn’t fly in an airplane.

Science is not black and white. It’s statistical and hard to understand. But science has overwhelmingly shown that adding more CO2 to the atmosphere is turning up the temperature. The parts per million of CO2 in the air acts like a thermostat. Add more CO2 turns up the temperature. The only way to return to the weather we liked in the past is to return to the CO2 levels of the 1960s, but we keep adding more. The only way to stop adding CO2 is to completely stop using fossil fuels. And if we want to turn down the thermostat, we need to remove CO2, which isn’t easy. That’s why taxing carbon is the only way to force us to change, but we won’t do that, because it’s not in our psychology.

However, The Deluge suggests when things get bad enough, we’ll change. It ends hopefully. People even have hope for their children and grandchildren.

Personally, I don’t think we will change. If you want to know what the next sixteen years could be like, read The Deluge. If you believe people can change, and we’ll do the right thing eventually, read The Deluge. If you don’t believe we’ll change, I wouldn’t bother with the book unless you like looking at train wrecks. And if you suffer from depression, I suggest avoiding reading this novel at all costs. I seldom get even the slightest depressed, but this book bummed me out.

Reviews:

JWH

A Painful Challenge to My Ego

James Wallace Harris, 2/26/24

I’m hitting a new cognitive barrier that stops me cold. It’s making me doubt myself. I’ve been watching several YouTubers report on the latest news in artificial intelligence and I’ve been amazed by their ability to understand and summarize a great amount complex information. I want to understand the same information and summarize it too, but I can’t. Struggling to do so wounds my ego.

This experience is forcing me to contemplate my decaying cognitive abilities. I had a similar shock ten years ago when I retired. I was sixty-two and training a woman in her twenties to take over my job. She blew my mind by absorbing the information I gave her as fast as I could tell her. One reason I chose to retire early is because I couldn’t learn the new programming language, framework, and IDE that our IT department was making standard. That young woman was learning my servers and old programs in a language she didn’t know at a speed that shocked and awed me. My ego figured something was up, even then, when it was obvious this young woman could think several times faster than I could. I realized that’s what getting old meant.

I feel like a little aquarium fish that keeps bumping into an invisible barrier. My Zen realization is I’ve been put in a smaller tank. I need to map the territory and learn how to live with my new limitations. Of course, my ego still wants to maximize what I can do within those limits.

I remember as my mother got older, my sister and I had to decide when and where she could drive because she wouldn’t limit herself for her own safety. Eventually, my sister and I had to take her car away. I’m starting to realize that I can’t write about certain ideas because I can’t comprehend them. Will I always have the self-awareness to know what I can comprehend and what I can’t?

This makes me think of Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Both are older than I am. Does Biden realize what he’s forgotten? Does Trump even understand he can’t possibly know everything he thinks he knows? Neither guy wants to give up because of their egos.

So, what am I not seeing about myself? I’m reminded of Charlie Gordon in the story “Flowers for Algernon,” when Charlie was in his intellectual decline phase.

Are there tools we could use to measure our own decline? Well, that’s a topic for another essay, but I believe blogging might be one such tool.

JWH

I Finally Finished All 271 Episodes of Perry Mason

by James Wallace Harris, 2/18/24

Back in 2018 I wrote “Why Am I Binge Watching Perry Mason?” I started out watching the series on MeTV, but decided I wanted to watch the series from the first to the last episode. After printing a listing of all the episodes to act as a checklist, I then subscribed to CBS All Access to stream the episodes in order. I soon discovered they skipped some episodes. That annoyed me, so I got on eBay and found a bargain on a used copy of the complete series on DVD. I watched Perry Mason at a steady pace through the seventh season, when I completely burned out on the show. This year, I went back and with my wife’s help, finished the series.

Last night we watched season 9, episode 30, “The Case of the Final Fade-Out.” It was a fun way to end the series because that story was about a murder on the set of a television show. That episode used the Perry Mason crew as actors portraying a television crew, plus Erle Stanley Gardner played the judge. And there was one in-joke I particularly loved. We overhear an actress telling someone, “Who wants to be on a show that goes up against Bonanza.” Perry Mason was being canceled partly because it couldn’t compete with that popular western.

Even though I enjoyed watching episode after episode of Perry Mason, I can’t say it’s a great show. My love for the series was mainly due to nostalgia. My favorite aspect of each episode was seeing the guest stars, the sets, cars, and costumes. Perry Mason was filmed in black and white, except for one episode. I love black and white movies and television shows but seeing that one episode of Perry Mason in color made me wish the entire series had been filmed in color. The guest stars, old cars, and sets looked great in that one episode. It shows why color TVs became so popular. I can remember our family getting one in 1965.

I loved the characters Perry Mason (Raymond Burr), Della Street (Barbara Hale), Paul Drake (William Hopper) and Hamilton Burger (William Talman). However, they seldom ventured from their one-dimensional characterizations. In one episode Raymond Burr got to play an old English seadog who looked like Perry Mason. That revealed Burr’s missing acting potential. I’ve read that Burr got a big kick out of playing that crusty old sailor with an accent. It’s a shame that Burr played Perry Mason so woodenly so damn consistently.

We never got to see the private lives of Perry, Della, and Paul. The show followed a rigid formula. I’ve read that in the books that Perry and Della were a couple, but I can’t even say that’s even hinted at in the TV show. It would have been great having Della being involved with both Perry and Paul over the nine seasons. That would have added so many character dimensions and plots to the show.

Another missed potential the show should have added, was having Perry Mason lose a case now and then. Poor old Hamilton Burger must lose all his. Having Perry always win, always right, always infallible, made his character cardboard.

It sounds like I’m complaining, but I’m not. For television shows coming out from 1957 to 1966, Perry Mason‘s formula was on par. I wrote an essay, “Does Merry mason Follow the Rules for Detective Fiction?” that dealt with its mystery plots. When you watch 271 of them, it gets painful that every client of Perry Mason saw the victim just before they were killed. Sometimes, just minutes or seconds from the murder event. You’d think the writers would have been more creative in producing plots.

Yet, even with such a rigid formula, it was hard to guess whodunit. I seldom did. Often the plots were so confusing that even when we’re told what happened, it’s hard to understand what happened. I know HBO has a new Perry Mason that addresses my complaints, and I’ve seen the first season of that series. It’s excellent, but it’s not the same Perry Mason. The HBO series might be closer to the original books, and it’s set when the original books were written, making it more authentic to them, but still, I’d like a better Raymond Burr Perry Mason.

I know this is a bizarre and an impossible wish to grant, but I wish someone would remake the 1957-1966 television series set in the 1950s and 1960s, with actors much like Burr, Hale, Hopper, and Talman, but with 2024 television production values. Like Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019) recreates 1969.

The old Perry Mason sometimes plotted stories based on current news events. One episode was obviously inspired by the Kitty Genovese case. It’s a shame they bungled that episode. Having one of the bystanders who didn’t want to get involved be the murderer detracts from the moral lesson of the real-life murder.

Another episode was about computer dating. I assume that the 1965 episode was inspired by Operation Match, which was in the news in 1965. Wikipedia has an interesting history of computer dating, and the idea goes back further than I imagined. Again, I thought the writers mangled the inspiration. Because they shoehorned it into their formula, the implications of matching couples by computer was just a novel idea they threw out but didn’t explore.

I’d love to see a new Perry Mason series that explores the reality of Ameria from 1957 through 1966. We changed so much in those years. It’s a shame that an artistic artifact from that period reveals so little about the times, mostly giving a false impression of the past. We humans prefer consuming fantasy over reality.

I know all of this sounds like I’m complaining, but I did enjoy watching the series. It’s just knowing what’s happened to the world in the last sixty years, and knowing the potential of what television can be that makes me fantasize about watching a much better Perry Mason based on the old series. It had so much potential.

Given the times could Perry Mason have been better? I thought Route 66 (1960-1964) proved Perry Mason could have taken more chances and been truer to the times. I must assume that the writers and producers of Perry Mason calculated what American TV watchers wanted to see at the time, and that’s what they gave them.

Could 1950s America have accepted Perry Mason if he lost cases, made mistakes, had personal flaws, was screwing Della, was jealous that sometimes Della might have been screwing Paul, and had to deal with the real years of 1957 through 1966?

I love watching old TV shows, shows from the years I was growing up. That’s mostly because of nostalgia, but it’s also because I like analyzing the past. I can remember the real, edgier, darker, 1950s, even though I was a kid. I wonder why television was so unreal. I often think that back then, we wanted real life to be like television. Now that I’m older, I’m wishing that old television had been more like real life. What does that say about me?

Perry Mason witnessed at least 271 dead bodies, murdered in all kinds of ways. Why didn’t that have a cumulative effect on his psyche? You’d think Perry would have become cynical and bitter as the show progressed over nine years. I think that’s the substantial difference between old television and new. The characters grow and change.

America changed dramatically from 1957 to 1966, but we don’t see that in Perry Mason, except for cars. Watching Perry Mason is escaping into a fantasy we all had a lifetime ago.

But I’ve got to wonder, will people growing up now believe television accurately captures life during their adolescent years when they rewatch their old favorite shows in retirement while looking back over their life?

Even with these complaints, I’m already thinking about starting the series over.

JWH