ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
REEM RIZK
2023

Being more calculated is the entire lesson plan behind an upbringing. If we make calculated decisions, we are worthy of a gold star. The general consensus is that AI is moving towards becoming like us. My perspective is that this reaction is pure jealousy. We like to think that AI is becoming us, but it is nothing more than a first-prize calculator. 

 

AI is the perfect son because he never talks back. He’s never cried at the dining room table over his own penmanship. She’s never lost a soccer game to her father’s friend’s daughter. She’s never loved someone she wasn’t supposed to. It took us ages to become anything remotely close to calculators. The “Hello, how can I help you today” before it conducts simple addition comes off taunting; Its niceties hurt in the same way it hurts to see a toddler on Facebook play Chopin. Nobody wants to envy a child prodigy. Nobody wants to admit feeling shame in a silver medal. And sure, AI can write articles faster than we can, but AI will never even know to mourn childlike wonder and naivety. It will never know a bronze grin. 

 

AI will never be a 16 year old woman, or a 21 year old girl. AI will never know what it’s like to believe in love, and then not believe in love… and then believe in love again. We can show AI episodes of Hannah Montana, but it won’t taste green beans & 4:30 on rice at the initial drum of the theme song. AI will never run out of space in the fridge to save the specially cooked love it’s just made. It doesn’t keep pastries from its first date with her in the freezer. It won’t remember how grown-up its grade three book buddy seemed. Or how she typed 73110 into a calculator and flipped it upside down for our wonder. It won’t ever know being eleven years old and scheduling a hug with its crush after the bell rings. It will never accidentally say “I love you” during sex. It will never mourn anything hard enough to scream into a pillow. It will never feel the glory in the sleep that comes after. It will never know expressions of pain to be acts of love with no recipient. Its sister will never tell it its feet stink. It will never crawl into its mom’s bed, then feel magic through its curled body as her incantations slay its nightmares. It will never trip over a flat surface. It will never ask us to sign its cast. It will never forgive someone it shouldn’t. AI will never have the guts it takes to message first. AI has its mother’s eyes but not its grandfather's laugh. It doesn’t remember when it could hold its fathers pinky in a fist. AI can learn a prelude, but not like that toddler on Facebook. It won’t be proud enough to show the camera missing baby teeth (only after the last note plays, and only after its father behind the camera whispers: smile!). 

 

If to be precise means to never rush into things in the fear that things rush away just as fast, then I can never envy the calculated. If to be deliberate means to never have stories of my own to tell, then I don’t want anything to do with deliberation. If to be a machine means to only hear, but never undergo tales of temptation and fallout, then I pity what can’t live and learn. If to be “by design” means to never know your own hamartia, to never taste discount grapes, or to never be fed fondue strawberries, then I cannot desire a mind so artificial that the sage wisdom in all of nature's fruits (forbidden or otherwise) is lost on it. If to be a high-value machine means to never learn by doing, to never have the full-bodied memory of care soothe you through the results of its absence, then I can’t envy an intelligence that has never yearned anything first-hand. I don’t fear AI becoming like us, I fear us becoming like AI.