Just now, national debates are on artificial intelligence (AI). The  Feb. 8 Recorder article, “Educators wrestle with help, harm of AI,” brings the issue to our kitchen table, as they say. The controversy and fear over what artificial intelligence can do, especially one called ChatGPT reputedly capable of writing on the graduate-school level, reminds me of an old classic western “Shane.” In it, a drifter named Shane teaches a young boy how to shoot and is admonished by the boy’s mother who sees the gun as evil, which prompts the ex-gunfighter to clarify: “The gun is a tool (says he to her), no better, no worse than an ax or a shovel. The gun is as good or bad as the man using it.”

If you asked people, experts and lay, if they think of computer apps like ChatGPT as tools, most of them would agree with Shane and say, yes, they are just tools; you decide what to do with them. But, if they are only tools like an ax or a shovel, why does the world, like the teachers in Greenfield, feel uncertain and even helpless about the powers of AI like ChatGPT invading our adjusted world with menacing evil? Why is it that all these digital tools — such as AI writers — seem to be more than tools, as if they are of alien origins? “I’m deathly afraid,” a New York rabbi says in an AP article (Recorder, Feb. 19).

Truth is, computing machines are not tools like axes and shovels, or even guns, which arise from our existential living conditions. Our life on this earth, from time immemorial, has demanded tools which come to us as a result of our needs to reduce labor. With an ax, we cut down the things we want to cut down, fully and completely under our own will and control. We would not invent, manufacture and own an ax in the first place unless our living conditions demanded it. We are not likely to need it if we live in an apartment or condominium; a Sahara Bedouin would certainly not need one and would refuse to own one even if offered free. Tools respond only to our needs and demands and not a single tool exists without our own needs and demands. But as the helpless Greenfield teachers feel, these digital tools come into our lives uninvited, unimagined, and unneeded by us. No ordinary human being has ever asked for an internet-driven computer or a pocket-sized smart phone to come into his life. Yet they come into our mental (not physical-material-real) lives and soon become our masters and we their obedient dependents and addicts. By the time we are told they are merely our tools, we have already become their tools.

Why have we become so helplessly beholden to these unasked-for tools — the actual rulers of our lives?

Much of our life today in America has to do with our moods and feelings, not with meeting our material needs. Getting a new pair of shoes or going grocery shopping, which used to occupy most Americans only three generations ago, is a chore with so little pleasure promised in it. We no longer live to satisfy our physical-material needs, which demand tools like shoes to protect our feet. Rather, we live to satisfy the needs of our mind, which are not as defined as bodily needs, thus susceptible to confusion and manipulation. We want to feel happy, pleased and satisfied with ourselves. Comfortably protected feet or full bellies don’t cut it. We don’t even brag about our new cars since everybody buys new cars. We still make trips to grocery stores, but that’s not where we seek happiness or pleasures of life. Our happiness and pleasures come from the TV, internet, social media, and consumer power. But none of such instruments is controlled by us. You choose your new shoes, your groceries and new cars, but not your mind’s demands. With the ubiquitous internet, few of us are capable of satisfying our minds without AI, the latest in the line of such mind-snatchers, creeping into our lives and society, and it’s unstoppable. We can only lurch here and there like zombies, traveling busily on a road where our destination is not our own making.

If we truly lived in a democratic society that cared about its citizens, would we have produced many of our modern inventions, say, the computer, the cellphone, now AI? Not likely. These gadgets represent all of our cumulative science and technology, which collectively costs trillions of dollars to invent and perfect. If we controlled our democratic system, would we the people agree to spend billions and trillions of tax money to invent what essentially amounts to a toy, with so little actual benefit? Are we happier with the new toys? For most of us, computers don’t compute; they merely connect to us to trivial distractions. Smart phones make us dumber and lazier with its supply of unlimited amusement. Social media are anti-social as they make us only lonelier and more disconnected. Would we, as citizens, agree to tax ourselves trillions to invest in something called ChatGPT to make our students illiterate, our office workers unemployable, our preachers soulless, and our social life unlivable? Would the citizens be that self-destructive? But the mind-opioid is here to stay — uninvited, unimagined and unasked-for — from corporate profiteers who collect their profit at our own present, and our children’s future — destruction.

Artificial intelligence, like ChatGPT, is not here to annihilate our minds and thinking, as alarmists say. It’s here because there is already little or nothing in our brains to recognize and resist it. Remember, the destructive process started a long time ago.

Jon Huer, columnist for the Recorder and professor emeritus, lives in Greenfield.

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