I had a bit of a realization. Maybe this is specific to a particular person (or type of), and not generalizable, but here it is:

People use the same reasoning about AI as they do vampires.

I have a friend like this. He’s a (-n otherwise) smart guy, a Ph.D.-holder (in a STEM field but not computer science) and occasional tabletop role-playing gamer (swords and sorcery as opposed to lazers and Science!).

But when we talk about AI (I’m a computer science guy, interested in AI back in the days of the AI Winter of the 1980s and super-duper cynical about all of it now), he’s basically perpetuating myth.

He doesn’t understand the issues and he is locked in hard to the mythology of computers that make decisions and think. Like… HARD. To be completely fair, this “decision-making capability” (yes, air quotes) of computers is what initially attracted me, when I was in the eighth grade, but I quickly (almost immediately?) realized that computer programs were ways of encoding known algorithms and processes, as opposed to granting computers the ability to *think*, like Prometheus stealing fire for humanity.

And when we talk, he speaks of “algorithms” and “what if computers <your-least-favorite-anthropomorphic-thing-here>?” and so on and so forth.

And it’s like talking about vampires.

“What if there was a vampire that could maybe acquire some partial immunity to sunlight?”

“What if there was a vampire that was essentially noble at heart and didn’t really want to kill humans but was cursed to require human blood to survive?”

“How could vampires actually exist in real life? Maybe it’s a virus that they catch that re-engineers their bone and muscle and creates a compulsion, like those ants that are compelled by fungus to climb to the top of a tree.”

It’s all this deep thought and conversation based on *myth and lore.*

I mean… I’m a (sci-fi) TTRPGer myself (or I wish I could be, like in the days of my youth, if I could find partners who weren’t, um… marginal) and I love the idea of throwing a micro-organism-driven vampire into the campaign (don’t tell, I want it to be a surprise), but… I don’t walk around in real life with garlic and crucifixes.

But we humans, we need our mythologies. (What’s mine? Hmmm….) So, here we are.

“Yes, I know, John, AI is just stringing words together, but what if there was some emergent unplanned behavior arising from that algorithm? After all, we’re just neurons firing, so why couldn’t a computer running a neural net achieve self-awareness?”

I’d grind my teeth harder, but I haven’t been flossing for years and the bone beneath my gums has receded, so I’d wind up just snapping one off. So, I just have to breathe deep and try to zen out.