Your Performance Review Episode 06—Kai

25 November 2022

In Episode 06 of Your Performance Review, a troubled child comes to Michel for a review and leaves by making a threat.

Listen to Episode 06

Kai is under review because he has been swearing in preschool. But Kai is no ordinary child. He has been modded, artificially enhanced with expanded memory and intelligence. He holds a universe of planetary information in his mind, including the details of all missions being flown by admin.

Michel asks Kai for help to recover his memory, but Kai rebels and makes a serious threat.

Will Machine Intelligence Set Us Free?

There’s debate around whether machine intelligence will set us free or we will end up working for it. In a previous newsletter, I argued that AI will never be completely running things. But there is an incrementalist argument to be considered. If we let machine intelligence in, bit by bit we will give away our humanity. Or, looking at it another way, if AI does more thinking for us, then we will have more time to do fun, human things.

You may recall when computers were marketed as time-saving devices. Once everything was computerized, we’d all have plenty of time for fun! But, ahem, it didn’t turn out that way. Computerization made everything more efficient, certainly, and freed up more time, true, and that spare time has simply become more work time.

The “making more time” argument didn’t work for computers, and it won’t work either for machine intelligence. What, then, about machine intelligence degrading the humanity of the human experience?

Machine intelligence will replace some human functions. There is already a bot doing therapy on people; it’s just in the form of a chatbot, sending out therapeutic texts. (“Can you tell me more about that?”) It will be a short time before you or I go to appointments to speak with machine intelligences instead of other people.

We’ll lose something with that, yes. But if good therapy were cheaper, more people would have access to it. Maybe self-driving cars are a bad idea, but an intelligent car would help avoid accidents. There are already cars like this on the road, and they’ve saved lives.

Thanks for reading this and listening to the show,

Lee