Robots, AI and Fear

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The articles of Cassandra Crossing I'm under license CC BY-SA 4.0 | Cassandra Crossing is a column created by Marco Calamari with the "nom de plume" of Cassandra, born in 2005.

A super productive Cassandra on Artificial Intelligence, so much so that we had to temporarily double the appointment with Cassandra Crossing to be able to keep up with her!

This article was written on May 16, 2023 from Cassandra

Cassandra Crossing 540/ Robots, AI and Fear

Why did slow, wobbly robots in science fiction movies scare us, but AI didn't? And is that a good thing?

Many of the 24 readers, particularly those of Cassandra's age, will have seen a number of old and not-so-old science fiction films, many of which featured scary robots, despite the fact that they were always stiff, slow to move and often wobbly.

For example the Daleks in Dr Who, Gort in Ultimatum to the earth, Robby in The Forbidden Planet, Tobor in The King of Robots, until you get to Terminators in the final scenes of the first film, a chrome-plated, ember-eyed creature, now in pieces but still crawling, relentless while pulling itself with one hand, towards its intended victim.

Slow but they scare us, because they exude non-humanity, because they have a purpose, because they are relentless.

In fact, the first Terminator, like The Thing, both by Hawks and Carpenter, are not science fiction films, but rather horror films.

And they tell us about scary and evil beings like aliens, but made "homemade" by some human.

Then even aliens and robots have sometimes become good and smurfy, but I challenge anyone to watch one of the aforementioned films again today without feeling at least a small shiver.

For Artificial Intelligence, however, no, this does not happen; AI is always perceived as a positive or at most neutral thing, never negative. Why?

This is a great question, and a complete answer is neither short nor easy. Cassandra will do what she can and knows how to respond.

First of all, AI has been talked about for over 50 years, and no one has ever raised questions about ethics or negative side effects, until very recently.

Secondly, today's AI, predominantly seen as Large Language Model, is the subject of the largest advertising and PR campaign ever seen in the computing world at the consumer and general public level.

Thirdly because, at least with the explicit name of Artificial Intelligence, it has only been the subject of smurfy and positive films; when she found herself playing the role of the "bad guy" she always took on her own names, from MCP to Skynet.

Fourth, we must not overlook the well-known “Eliza Effect”, which affects the majority of general ChatGPT users. An effect enormously amplified by the efficiency and complexity of GPT3 and its tens of billions of parameters, compared to the thousand lines of code of Weizenbaum's Eliza.

As a fifth and final point, we consider that working in AI is a fascinating and sought-after activity, which can excite both those who are fascinated by technologies and novelties, and those who are more pragmatically concerned with the problem of working where money can be made.

So, why on earth should we be scared by these immaterial beings controlled by non-human creatures who, coming out of the walls and the internet, are crawling towards us, smiling and promising us Toyland?

Why is Cassandra telling you this? Bah!

Marco Calamari

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