TAKEAWAYS:
AI's Dual Role: AI can be categorized into two primary roles - one focused on practical applications, automation, and efficiency, and the other centered on addressing and influencing human emotions and feelings.
Emotional Impact: Klaus underscores the importance of emotional expression and its capacity to shape human behavior, highlighting the potential for positive and negative influences through artistic expression and media.
Balancing Act: Klaus advocates for safeguarding against harmful content and manipulation, emphasizing the need to balance practical AI applications and the protection of human emotions and well-being in an ever-evolving technological landscape.
In general, Artificial Intelligence may be assigned into two categories. I am not a computer geek nor have any training in computer science, but I am sensitive to the distinction between that which is re-used information and the acute capacity for humans to present new grasps of reality in the world around us. As a shorthand, I distinguish between Artificial Intelligence being (1) inherently useful and performing unerringly with inanimate things and systems, relieving humans of repetitive and intricate tasks, and (2) inherently useless to human beings in engaging with and solving the doubts and upheavals in their emotional lives, unless borrowing descriptions of behavior to suit an outcome. Artificial Intelligence is clueless about the emotional human mind.
There are over 8000 words in the Oxford Dictionary of the English language that relate to emotions and the seemingly infinity ways in which emotions can change behavior. Artistic expression, whether in visual, print, dance, music, or other forms, is to convey an emotional response to highlight the beauty, charm, horror, quiescence, mystery, fantasy, history, or forecast a future in emotional terms that are interpreted by the individual from their belief systems.
That artistic expression can also be used to lie, cheat, twist, confuse, enrage, connive, propagandize, and incite behaviors and activities that are unhealthy and dangerous to an open society. Prejudice, hate, and violence should not be broadcast in any medium at any time for any reason. And like pornography, we know it when we see it or experience it. That manifestation of broadcast information should be restricted, if not outright banished from the public sphere, always without malice. The First Amendment allows free speech but, given the intent of the Constitution, should not allow free, unfettered harm of rejection or personal injury.
Eventually, my refrigerator will tell my iPad that I am out of radishes, low on Half&Half, too much ground chuck, the bread is too old, the salad from last night is soggy, need eggs, and the bacon in the freezer is eligible for fossil status. AI is at its most useful but still not at any point of running out of capacity. Yet, I would be remiss in admitting that I would be comfortable reacting to emotional suggestions from a program on TV telling me how to feel about a scenario it stole from an episode of ‘Foreign Intrigue’ from the early ’50s when trench coats and fedoras were required. The immediacy of emotional response to fit the grasp of one’s mind, in an instance of happening, is a personal outcome that is true to that person but may not be the cobbled-up collection of what a computer says is now. In that lies the susceptibleness of the human spirit for good or bad and its need for protection.
