Artificial intelligence is another jump in technology that should make us nervous | Opinion

The December 26, 2022 edition of the Herald-Leader carried an essay by Molly Crabapple entitled “Beware a world where artists are replaced by robots – starting now.” Her essay is a much-needed warning that science can be not only a great boon to human well-being but also a force suffocating both creativity and liberty. Nazi fascists thought science/technology would make them and the State unassailable by people who did not want to be robots themselves.

Crabapple writes that computer Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been used to probably illegally, certainly immorally, scarf up images created by illustrators around the world and used those images as sources for computer-generated illustrations that will put human illustrators out of business/work and close off one world of human creativity.

This is yet one more episode in the costs/benefits of the 18th and 19th centuries Industrial Revolution in the west. That Revolution for the first time in history made measurable improvements in the general well-being (food, clothing, shelter, health) of masses of people.

But that revolution for quite a while created masses of industrial workers who fought to just stay alive. Well-being was a far-off dream.

This is the world Marx rebelled against, calling for a violent revolution to create a workers’ paradise wherein all contributed what they could to the well-being of all and each took what he needed. There would be no distinctions of class. All would be equal in all ways. Ironically, Marxism would mimic the world of houses made of ticky-tacky created by and for America’s industrial-based middle class that had achieved that status without commune revolution.

And, like that middle class, in the communist world there would be an incredible amount of uniformity in thought, deed, and possessions. Communism’s idealized paradise, however, cannot tolerate any individual creativity, new thoughts, or divergent opinions because all such things threaten universal equality. Paradise turns out to a gray, dull, joyless, devoid of surprise world. Exhilaration would be unthinkable. Without many rivers of creativity what would there be to be exhilarated about?

Ms. Crabapple’s essay is a warning that the same thing is happening in today’s Technological, Progressive, Big Business Capitalism America. We say “Science can do this!” There is little thought of “Yes, but what are the consequences regarding fundamental values?”

In Big Business/Progressive America that question is not allowed. There must be an unchallenged deep sense of corporatism and uniformity. Both Big Business and Progressive politics are top-down ideologies that are risk adverse. They incessantly pursue uniformity of thought and actions. Woke/cancel culture is a natural outgrowth of such a world view. Eventually, not only houses but individuals are ticky-tacky, indistinguishable from one another.

In politics equal rights and equal opportunity have been transformed into an ideology of Equity that demands equal outcomes, Marx’s dream. Individual creativity, merit, ingenuity, accomplishments have to be submerged if not destroyed. Comedians, a free society’s prophets who highlight our failings and absurdities, are censored. The University of Kentucky, a projection of the western world treasuring free thought, must hide or destroy an artist’s rendering of antebellum Kentucky that ironically, given those who cannot tolerate it, depicts African slaves undergirding the state’s Southern economy. Directors of national community public platforms (technology at work) decide who might be allowed to express themselves, often after consultation with the federal government.

Today, old Democratic liberals, once stalwarts in defending personal liberty and freedom of expression are, it seems, still reacting to their image of 1950s cloth-coat, church-going, silent majority men and women who wanted everyone to conform to their social standards. But that world is long gone. Now, it is the Left’s descendants allied with the might and power of Technology, Big Business and Big Government who have found the everlasting Truth and are the enforcers who demand that individuality and creativity be sacrificed to automation in a soulless, uniform world (like that of AI created art) that knows nothing of liberty.

J. Larry Hood is a retired state government employee who presently teaches world civilization at Midway University and American and Kentucky courses for UK’s OLLI program.