The Kids These Days and Their Fancy ‘AI’
So, another day, another headline about ‘AI’ causing a ruckus. This time, it’s about some chatbot, Grok they call it, and Google’s fancy ‘summaries’ messing up after some fella, Charlie Kirk, bought the farm. Apparently, these machines started spouting nonsense, pointing fingers at innocent folks. And these ‘kids’ – I swear, they eat this stuff up like it’s gospel. Back in my day, if you wanted information, you went to the library, or you typed ‘dir’ in a DOS prompt and actually read the file list. No fancy algorithms ‘hallucinating’ about who did what. We had reliable data, not digital ouija boards.
The Illusion of Progress: From Command Line to Confounding Confusion
I remember when ‘artificial intelligence’ was a neat concept in an academic paper, not a glorified autocomplete function that hallucinates. We built systems that worked. They did what you told them to, precisely. You gave a command, it executed the command. Simple. Elegant. Now, you ask a ‘smart’ speaker the time, and it tells you about the history of clocks and then tries to sell you a new one. It’s like we’ve traded precision for… well, for this. This digital fog that makes everything murkier instead of clearer. And don’t even get me started on ‘social media’ – a cesspool of misinformation where every Tom, Dick, and Harry with a keyboard thinks they’re an expert.
The Real Problem: We’re Handing Over Our Brains
The real head-scratcher here isn’t that these ‘AI’ programs mess up. It’s that people believe them. It’s like we’ve all collectively decided that if a machine says it, it must be true, even when it’s demonstrably false. What happened to critical thinking? What happened to common sense? We’re so busy chasing the next shiny object, the next ‘innovation,’ that we’re forgetting how to discern truth from fiction. We’re outsourcing our intellect to algorithms that can’t even tell fact from fiction after a high-profile incident. It’s a recipe for disaster, I tell you, a full-blown intellectual capitulation.
The Good Old Days (and the Future We’re Forgetting)
I spent decades wrangling mainframes, writing code that had to be right. A single misplaced comma could bring down an entire system. There was a rigor, a discipline, that seems completely absent in this current free-for-all. Now, they push out these half-baked ‘AI’ tools, and when they inevitably spew nonsense, it’s just ‘a feature, not a bug.’ This isn’t progress; it’s intellectual laziness disguised as innovation. We’re building a world where the machines are getting dumber, and we’re letting them drag us down with them. Give me a green screen and a solid command prompt any day over this digital snake oil. At least then, I knew who was in charge: me.