Do We Need to Develop A.I.s as Quickly as Possible, Because Our Time is Running Out?
By Dr. Jim Castagnera, Esq.
Do We Need to Develop A.I.s as Quickly as Possible, Because Our Time is Running Out?
By Dr. James Ottavio Castagnera, Esq.
If he’s right, engineer Blake Lemoine will go down in history as the first human being to
converse with a sentient A.I. On June 11th the Washington Post broke the story that Lemoine
claims to have carried on a conversation with LaMDA, Google’s system for building chatbots.2
Lemoine told the Post, “If I didn’t know exactly what it was, which is this computer program we
built recently, I’d think it was a 7-year-old, 8-year-old kid that happens to know physics.”
Lemoine, who works (worked?) for Google’s “Responsible AI” unit, released conversation
transcripts in support of his claim, and promptly was suspended.
Lemoine, who may be something of a whistleblower, also made an interesting point: “I
think this technology is going to be amazing. I think it’s going to benefit everyone. But maybe
other people disagree and maybe us at Google shouldn’t be the ones making all the choices.”
I agree with him that this technology is already amazing. I disagree that it’s going to
benefit everyone. On the contrary, I believe it will make many millions of people redundant.
Consider the gig workers who labor for Uber, Lyft, DoorDash and all the other Internet-based
service companies. These folks might have held well-paid manufacturing jobs, except that what
remains of manufacturing in America is performed increasingly by robots. And so they struggle
in the courts and via labor organizing to win wages and benefits comparable to what their
unionized moms and dads made in the auto plants and steel mills of America’s golden age.
1 James Ottavio Castagnera holds a JD and PhD (American Studies) from Case Western Reserve University. His 50-
year career included 23 years as Rider University’s associate provost and legal counsel for academic affairs.
Retiring from Rider in 2019, he is now president of Dr. Jim’s One-Stop HR Shop, providing legal, communications,
compliance and consulting services in the field of human resources. [https://www.drjimshrshop.com/]
2 https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/11/google-ai-lamda-blake-lemoine/
Instead of better jobs, what these gig workers are likely to get is what the Brits call
“redundancy notices.” Walking down a street in Austin (TX) earlier this year, I found myself
being followed by a silver box about the size of a dorm-room frig. The box was being shadowed
by two lads on bikes who informed me their firm was testing a food-delivery bot. Where will the
gig workers go when all the Ubers are self-driving and DoorDash switches to bots?
It gets worse. Lawyers like me tend to feel smug. Shakespeare may have wanted to kill us
all. But we’re sure modern America can’t do without a few million of us. Consequently, like
Dr. Frankenstein, we are creating the monster that will eventually, but inevitably, turn on us.
Law firms already use A.I. for due diligence, legal research, and billing. Experts confidently
predict that A.I. will replace paralegals within this current decade. One well-known litigator,
Tom Girardi (the inspiration for the lawyer in “Erin Brockovitch”) told Forbes, “It may even be
considered legal malpractice not to use AI one day.”3 How large a leap is it from there to
unbiased, dispassionate judges and consummately competent attorneys?
Homo sapiens assumes itself to be the pinnacle of evolution on earth. I recently read a claim
on Linked In that we are destined to be “the voice of the universe.” What incredible hubris!
Again, Mary Shelley’s novel comes to mind. This leads me to another aging novel, Kurt
Vonnegut’s Player Piano (1952). In his first book, Vonnegut envisioned a future in which most
folks did busy work on road crews, while a few engineers and managers ran the robots which did
all the meaningful work. This prescient yarn prefigures the Uniform Basic Income.
But Vonnegut couldn’t see at a distance of 70 years that even his engineers and Ph.D.s might
one day be redundant. And, if A.I.s, perhaps under the control of a few oligarchs, are able to do
every imaginable task, why keep seven or eight billion of us around at all? Some anthropologists
3 https://www.forbes.com/sites/cognitiveworld/2019/02/09/will-a-i-put-lawyers-out-ofbusiness/?
sh=9dc9d0131f00
believe that 40,000 years ago Cro-Magnons ate Neanderthals.4 One might find the parallel
compelling.
And, if we are painfully honest with ourselves, might it not be for the best? Mother Nature
may think so. We’ve over-populated and trashed the planet. Now she’s turned on us… and
much sooner than our scientists and meteorologists predicted. We thought we had at least a few
more decades to reverse climate change. Increasingly frequent severe-weather events suggest
that the future is now. And, then, there are the megalomaniacs like Putin who just might blow us
all up before Mother Nature can consummate her revenge.
Perhaps what we really need to do is accelerate the creation of our descendants --- our
successors --- while we still can.
4 https://phys.org/news/2009-05-modern-humansneanderthals.
html#:~:text=They%20overlapped%20with%20modern%20humans,disappearing%20about%2030%2
C000%20years%20ago.&text=One%20scenario%20for%20Neanderthal%20extinction,co%2Dexistence%20and%20
possible%20interaction.
