Will the John Connor We Get Be the John Connor We Need?
Some visiting friends and I took a long drive through Joshua Tree National Park in early March. It was still pretty cold in the Mojave desert—with surprise murder-wind attacks popping up often. This day was particularly beautiful though, with spectacular clouds floating across a bright blue sky.
We took my guest’s rental car—a Toyota Tacoma pickup truck—which I drove. The truck ended up being a minor character in this story.
On our way down to the Cholla Garden—aka the teddy bear cactus garden—we passed a cyclist standing next to his bicycle on the opposite side of the road. He was outfitted in the skimpy, garish spandex bike clothes favored by distance riders. Being on that side of the road meant he’d just climbed a ridiculously long, steep hill. He had definitely earned a break.
The teddy bear cactus garden is so far from the main part of Joshua Tree National Park that it’s not only in another county, it’s in another desert—the Colorado rather than the Mojave. It’s also a completely different ecosystem.
As we drove down down down the narrow twisty road, losing elevation with every mile, the cyclist’s accomplishment seemed even more impressive.
On our trip back up the hill—after visiting the least cuddly teddy bears imaginable—we agreed that none of us would ever want to attempt a ride like that.
It was now late afternoon, when the sun’s low angle turns driving into game of chicken with the sun visor. How long can you wait before moving it, knowing that turn just ahead will put you smack in the sun’s rays? Also, the wind had picked up significantly, affecting steering. It howled against the truck like exaggerated horror film sound effects. Driving a big truck was suddenly a lot less fun.
As we crested the hill, I saw the cyclist in the distance, standing by his bike again. This time he was in a turnout on the other side of the road. He was looking at his phone.
“Uh oh, he’s in trouble,” I said.
“Naw,” my very athletic friend said knowingly from the backseat. “He’s just taking another break.”
Maybe, I thought, but he’s not much farther along than where we’d seen him more than an hour earlier. The road was relatively flat, but he faced a brutal headwind.
I asked my friends if they minded going back, as I did a u-turn in the middle of the road.
A strange truck pulling up to you in a known redneck county might mean trouble—possibly more so if you happen to be Asian, as this guy was. His expression, as we approached, was wary. When he saw that the big truck was being driven by a woman of a certain age, his look changed to something like confusion. I rolled down my window.
“We’re just checking on you. That’s an awfully big hill you climbed. You OK?”
“Ah. Yes. I’m OK… No. I’m really cold… Freezing. Actually. I was just texting my friends to come pick me up.”
“Where are your friends?”
“Boy Scout.” he said.
The Boy Scout trail parking lot was a good 20 miles away. The sun was getting lower and the wind was blowing harder. Even though we weren’t headed that direction, we told him to toss his bike in the back and hop in. Hooray for a truck! He did so gladly.
After we exchanged the usual introductory data points like first names and where we all live, the cyclist revealed that he’s a PhD postdoc at UCLA working in visual artificial intelligence.
“Oh, so like you spend your day perfecting deep fakes?” I joked.
He laughed and said he spends his day detecting them. “They’re getting really good,” he said. “It’s going to cause a lot of problems. It’ll be harder and harder to know what’s real.”
“So are you going to save humanity from AI or march us all into its clutches?” I asked.
“I’m going to save humanity,” he said with genuine determination. “If I can...”
We talked about ChatGPT and Elon Musk and Neuralink. I said that despite the current “Spaceman bad” anti-Elon narrative, I find him to be brilliant and ultimately a force for good.
“I do, too!” he said enthusiastically, sounding surprised to hear such an opinion from what he must have seen as an old lady driving a pickup truck. He said he’d followed a similar trajectory to Elon in which he was 100% in on AI in the early days, but changed his mind when he realized the very real dangers it poses. I told him I often think of the clip where Elon says AI will destroy humanity if it gets in the way of a goal, but that it’s nothing personal.
“Exactly!” he said. “It’s terrifying.”
We drove on in silence for a minute.
“Why do you know so much about AI?” he asked.
“Doesn’t everybody know this stuff?”
“No!” all three passengers said in unison.
Huh, I thought. I know people using DALL•E and other things to make art. These days, all the cool kids are writing prompts for GPT. It seems like AI is everywhere. Like when people say “Hey Siri,” who do they think they’re talking to? Do they think those targeted ads they get every time they go online have been chosen for them by a person in a badly lit office that smells like microwave popcorn? How about autocorrect and predictive text? Alexa telling them the weather forecast? AI has become the best friend you didn’t know you had and will likely never be rid of. The optimistic view is it will be couch-surfing your life until the end of time. The pessimistic take is… well, pretty pessimistic.
We pulled into the Boy Scout parking lot to find three other cyclists putting on warm clothes and wrestling bikes onto the roof of a Prius. Four guys and four bikes in a Prius. It didn’t even seem possible. They all looked a lot like our passenger: late 20s, Asian, nerdy.
As my friends and I drove off, it struck me that maybe all that’s between us and a bleak Terminator future is a sweet kid who set off on a hundred mile bike trip across the desert without even bringing a jacket. Not exactly John Connor, but his heart’s definitely in the right place.
P.S. In case you haven’t seen a chatbot in action, here’s a sample. You give the thing a prompt—anything from a description of how to remove a peanut butter and jelly sandwich from a VCR written in the style of the King James Bible, to an extremely complex computer program workaround—and it gives you back an answer that is often surprising in its complexity and… intelligence.
It can also write a sweet bedtime story better than I can.
Hello irrelevance my old friend… Yep, just like that, a few new side hustles I’d created vanished before I’d even made business cards for them. That’s a joke, of course. Business cards—like everything else—are obsolete.