The Missing Link in the Artificial Intelligence Story

I’ve written and linked to a bit about Artificial Intelligence. I see the upsides and the downsides. The mislabeling (marketing.) The gold rush. The warnings. And I’m starting to see a bit of tarnish on this shiny new object of desire. It’s fascinating. 

What’s starting to puzzle me in this ongoing discussion is what we’re not seeing. 

But first a few themes.

One of the biggest stories is how AI is going to give us more freedom to enjoy our lives and be more creative by assuming many of the mundane drudgery of our lives. What immediately follows that is how many jobs we’re going to lose and stories of “too eager for the quarterly results” CEOs cutting jobs. 

The next recurring story is how this will affect creativity by replacing artists, stealing from artists, and generally reducing creativity to bits and bytes created by bits and bytes. 

And then there’s our continued march away from knowledge and facts to one where we don’t know what’s real and what isn’t. Especially once the supposed AI bots and Large Language Models start feeding on themselves instead of just on the stuff we make up.  

Those three themes seem to predominate the conversation. But back to what I’m not seeing. 

Why aren’t we seeing the tech bros advocating ways to use AI to help us get rid of the some of the scourges of the Internet and our lives? 

A few examples:

• A tool to indentify and remove spam from email, texts, phone calls, etc… 
• A tool to indentify scams and scammers.
• A quick label on any web page that tells us how many trackers there are and where they are from.
• A tool that always puts the “Continue Watching” queue at the top of the home page of streaming apps.
• A tool that kills ads for products we just purchased. 
• A tool that actually lets users unsubscribe from content. 
• A tool that points to which company sold our data to the new content in our in-boxes. 
• A label that justs says “Bullshit” on content that is bullshit.
• A tool that tells us when our ISP is throttling bandwidth. 
• A tool that always links back to the original source for regurgitated content.
• A tool that identifies and labels bots.
• A tool that tracks and reports the origin of evil doers on the web.
• A tool that actually deciphers error messages, tells us the real problem, and connects us to useful solutions that don’t require wading through scores of bogus and out of date webpages and videos.
• A tool that actually lets us vote advertisments up or down and lets us say I never want to see this ad again.

And of course:

A quick label that says this content was created by artificial means.  

I’m sure there are others. 

Of course this kind of “intelligence” would devastate so many business models that the global economy would probably collapse. But then perhaps there could be an AI tool that tells calls bullshit on the stuff economists and politicians tell us about that as well.