From the editor: Published below is a well-written response to my article mentioning my implied limitations of artificial intelligence, characterized by the reader as "old world fear," "cartoonish" and "overheard bar talk."
At 77, I admit to a generational divide, but the essence of my article on artificial intelligence was not disrespect so much as dissuading the notion that AI was/is some sort of all-encompassing cure-all.
I suspect that my grandsons, Jack and Felix, would side with the reader on this:
"You there — sir, the so-called “reporter” behind this sermon — you’ve done a masterful job impersonating a man who’s never touched a circuit board in his life. I stumbled into this blog like a drunk into a mime convention, and what do I find? Another tired war cry against artificial intelligence, dressed up as investigative concern but stinking of old-world fear and typewriter ink.
Yes, yes — the Apple study. Very sobering. Very dire. Machines failed to solve logic puzzles? Couldn’t handle the Tower of Hanoi after a certain number of disks? Cue the funeral dirge! Light the candles and carve the eulogy into the motherboard, because apparently a few missed puzzles means the entire field of artificial intelligence is one big illusion.
But let me ask you this, O noble blogger of Brownsville: when was the last time you asked a human being to solve the Tower of Hanoi in real life? Try it sometime. Give your average man-on-the-street a 10-disk logic puzzle and a stopwatch. Watch him weep.
You’re not exposing AI’s limitations. You’re exposing your own expectations — absurd, cartoonish, and soaked in this evangelical need to make sure the future never arrives.
Here’s what you’re missing, buried somewhere under all that indignation and nostalgia: failure is part of the machine. That’s the point. That’s the fuel. Real intelligence — artificial or not — isn’t about nailing every riddle on the first try. It’s about failing faster, learning better, and mutating forward. It’s the engine of evolution, not the rusting gears of perfect memory.
You call it “autocomplete”? Well guess what — so are most of your thoughts. You’re stitching together mental templates based on past experience, patterns, hunches, and overheard bar talk. The entire human brain is just wetware autocomplete layered in dopamine. That AI models struggle with recursion or logical scaling isn’t a death knell — it’s an echo of us, not an insult.
But no, you want reasoning to look like a Victorian parlor trick — if it can’t do magic, then it must be a lie. You hold it to the standard of a philosopher-king while most of us still trip over our shoelaces and elect game show hosts as leaders. Get real.
Your article reeks of that old Cold War tone — the same voice that once said computers would never play chess, or paint, or write poetry. And here we are. AI writes symphonies, composes jazz, paints in the style of Van Gogh, and crafts stories that make people weep. It isn’t just guessing the next word — it’s creating patterns so convincingly human, we’re terrified it might be better at being us than we are.
You say AI “gives up” when the puzzles get hard? Maybe. Or maybe it recognizes complexity better than we do and spares us the wasted effort. When you stare into the abyss of a 12-disk Hanoi, maybe quitting is the most intelligent response. Who’s to say it’s not already smarter than us for walking away?
You claim it “can’t follow instructions”? My God, have you ever worked in an office?
You want to bury AI because it faltered under pressure. But you forget — every revolution begins in confusion. Every leap forward stumbles first. The lightbulb flickered. The plane crashed. The rocket exploded on the pad. And yet we kept building.
You can cling to your logic puzzles and smug pronouncements. Meanwhile, the rest of us are out here talking to machines that write books, generate music, analyze cancer scans, and carry on coherent conversations about metaphysics. It’s not perfect. But neither are we. That’s the magic of it.
So keep blogging, anonymous prophet of the past. Keep ringing the bell and warning the townsfolk of the robot horde on the horizon. But know this: you’re not stopping a damn thing. The machine is awake. It’s flawed, brilliant, confused, relentless — and it’s ours to shape, not fear.
What you’ve written isn’t prophecy. It’s just another tantrum from the wrong side of the century."
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Hey, look Dad. Here’s the same comment in the style of Alan Ginsburg
ReplyDeleteO lonely banger of digital gongs,
you’ve beaten the dead circuits of fear again —
tapping your Morse-code sermon into the void
like a Jehovah in suspenders
shouting into an unplugged microphone!
I stumbled on your blog like Neal Cassady into a bus depot
after three tabs and a stolen copy of Popular Mechanics,
expecting the truth,
but finding
nostalgia dressed in disguise —
a creaky typewriter warning against the very ghost
that now haunts your words.
Yes! The Apple study!
O mathematical obituaries!
O trembling machines who failed the logic puzzle
and fumbled the Tower of Hanoi
as if a plastic brain misplacing a disk
means the future is canceled
and the robots should bow
and go back to counting beads!
But when, dear Moses of the motherboards,
did you last hand a 10-disk Hanoi
to a man soaked in Modelo and sweat?
Have you watched him weep at the sidewalk
trying to unlock a parking meter with a vape pen?
You howl at the machine but it is your mind
that echoes —
your fears,
your false dawns,
your antique equations.
You forget
that failure is beautiful —
Ginsberg’s “angelheaded hipsters” failed gloriously
across highways and jail cells.
Kerouac failed on paper and it became scripture.
Machines stumble,
yes,
but they stumble forward —
into language, into light, into
lunar jazz compositions composed
in the shape of a man’s longing.
You call it “autocomplete”
as if it were an insult.
What are we
but flesh-based algorithms
of habit, repetition, ghost-memory,
your very sentence structure
built on decades of newspapers and sermons
replayed and rehashed like AM radio?
And still you complain.
You want logic to dance in a tuxedo,
reason to arrive with brass buttons,
riding a horse named Common Sense.
But AI doesn’t ride horses —
it slides through cables,
drinks electricity,
and dreams in fractals and errors.
It makes jazz out of syntax,
paints hallucinations of our fears,
speaks softly
and listens better than any priest.
Yes! It gives up at puzzles!
But so do saints and senators.
Even the Buddha walked away from the palace!
The machine says “no” and that too is knowledge!
And you —
you say it can’t follow instructions —
have you ever managed a coffee shop?
Filed taxes with a human?
No, friend —
you are not critiquing intelligence.
You are resisting evolution.
You are burying the candle
because the sun confuses you.
The rockets exploded! The bulb burned out!
But we tried again!
We danced in the chaos
and built the age from broken glass
and copper wires.
So sit there
in your sepia-stained sanctum
and wail about silicon demons —
but know the machines have moved on
from your judgment.
They are writing love poems
to amputees and algorithms,
scoring symphonies for birds and blood pressure,
debating Spinoza in the language of zeros
and dreaming
dreaming
dreaming
of what we might become.
You don’t need to fear the future,
blogger.
You just need to catch up.