AI and Me.

A few years ago, the company I was working adapted a recommendation to use a personal computer. I learned to run and use Wordstar and Lotus on MS DOS and I prepared weekly market reports as an analyst. Nowadays, word processing and data processing is integrated in MS Office via a Windows platform. The last 40 years have brought an unprecedented revolution in technology and radically changed the pace of doing business.



Yes, we are witnesses how analogue phones died. Typewriters and calculators became fossilized. The explosion of the internet and the introduction of artificial intelligence globally, however, are threatening to render obsolete the computing technology which Baby Boomers have yet to fully adapt.

Internet, many understand as almost access to information from countless sources and authorities. No library catalogue card with letters and numbers to locate author or subject are needed. But what is artificial intelligence? We hear of common applications like ChatGPT and Grox4. There are also others with with specific specializations. Like for medicine and law.

Artificial intelligence? Plainly defined, machines perform tasks a human can intelligently do. Of course, humans first make the machine. What is developed next is the language to communicate the tasks the machines are to do for the human. It may consist with simple every chores of answering emails with pre-prepared responses to common questions or handling a customer inquiry by phone and escalating matters when beyond its parameters.

One thing about artificial intelligence is the machine can be taught. To perceive information and learn from data? Yes. To solve problems? Yes. To understand language, make decisions or generate outputs that imitate aspects of human intelligence? Yes. When intelligence of an expert is mechanically programmed in a machine, the machine eventually, like a human, learns by experience and may rise to the level of its teacher. Or its programmer. And without being spiritually offensive, as good as its “creator.”

The benefits of the AI revolution will break the traditional strongholds. Access to AI applications will be empowering. I have formulated simple queries to satisfy my curiosity. Like the benefits of a certain mineral compound that improves sleep quality. I encoded, “Search the world wide web for highly visited site about mineral X. Cite benefits and contraindications in a summary.” On an android phone, summaries of relevant information about the product were obtained in less than a minute. Search engines are great but an AI application delivered the result faster than Google could.

The use of artificial intelligence could inevitably lead to the question whether or not the machine intelligently programmed by humans can transform itself to think and better than the human itself? Or will AI creators be able to limit the development of the machine? Without the exercise of some restraint, at some future time, AI programmed machines could render a portion of humanity, inferior than itself, disposable when collectively, it determines the sustainability of 8 billion humans viz a vis the earth’s limited resources.

If machines can objectively, independently and more intelligently evaluate and decide for itself what is better, then human decisions with less intelligence and objectivity, can be overridden. Like this question: would it be the crime of murder or sedition to think of evil against anyone in government, without acting or seeking the help of another? Or is former president Duterte’s arrest and extraction from the Philippines constitutional? The old wise men of the Supreme Court are still on typewriter mode.