Here and there: Is it AI or AS? The validity of SB 525

While watching and listening to TV and radio reports or reading newspaper articles about artificial intelligence, or AI as it's called for short, do you sometimes get the fleeting impression that, in some ways, we will be enslaved instead of being freed to increase our human potential?

Be that as it may — and this comes from an admitted Luddite whose heart skips a beat now and then because of technophobia — are you sometimes just downright confused about the, uh, “intelligent” software on your electronic devices?

Case in point (and recently I've heard similar reports from relatives and friends): Not wanting to open an old-school paper map next to the driver's seat (and who does these days?), I asked Siri to direct me to an office in the north sector of my hometown. I told her the exact address, although I kind of knew where the building was. Running a bit late, I was hoping she could give me a new shortcut to save a few minutes.

As she mentioned several different streets to take, I relaxed, smiled, feeling a sense of trust, and thought I was on my way to make the appointment on time.

But my happiness — buoyed by a Sun Records compilation CD — was short-lived, as Siri directed me to an address in Gualala, on Highway 1 in Mendocino County, a good 90 to 100 miles, I estimated, from where I knew I wanted to go. (By the way, when I asked Siri as I wrote this column to spell Gualala and tell me how far it was from my home, she said something about Walla Walla, Washington, and my destination was 1.5 miles up the road. Nope.)

As I clearly repeated the address to Siri, she replied that she was going to show me a map to … Walla Walla, I guess. I clicked off and, after quelling an urge to throw the phone out of the car window, while keeping both eyes on the road, of course, I arrived where I wanted to go. Shortly afterward, I was convinced that, instead of AI, the software — or whatever's passing for AI these days — should go by the acronym AS, for artificial stupidity.

Yes, I've heard and read the reports about Microsoft engineers who say AI is nearing human ingenuity (solving an object-stacking problem, for example); how AI's potential on battlefields alarms U.S. defense experts and warrants the need to figure out some rules for its use; and how Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp and has created an AI technology called LLaMA, powering online chatbots, has released the system's underlying computer code to open-source software, computer code that can be copied, modified and reused. No surprise, it's an action Meta's competitors say is dangerous.

But if you ask the members of the Writers Guild of America, who are on strike during a time when chatbots are already generating written material, they fear TV studios, for instance, may replace them with AI — or have their work used to train AI to write scripts that only need a little human brushing-up — all at a much lower rate than their current pay. To the writers, the question is AI? And their reply is, “Ay-yi-yi!”

Even President Biden, when he dropped by a May 4 White House meeting of tech executives trying to come up with AI “guardrails,” reportedly told the execs, “What you're doing has enormous potential and enormous danger.”

True, but right now I just want Siri to get me where I need to go in Solano County and get me there on time — you know what I mean? I want her electronically generated advice to, in effect, dissuade me to keep my cell phone on the car console instead of chucking it out the window and facing the possibility of a huge fine for littering.

Closer to home this past week, I interviewed members of Local 1021 of the Service Employees International Union, who rallied Thursday at the Solano County Healthcare and Social Services office to draw attention to SB 525. It would guarantee, at its passage, a $25-an-hour statewide minimum wage to start for healthcare and behavioral healthcare workers and the employees who support them, including custodians, security guards and other contractors.

Akbar Bibb, vice president of Region A (North Central) of the local, reminded me that our governments, at every level, told healthcare workers that they were “essential” during the pandemic, which emerged on a global scale in early March 2020.

In a prepared statement, Mike Richardson, a communications specialist for Local 1021, said the state's healthcare system can't function without essential healthcare workers and behavioral health workers “who are devoted to our patients, our clients and our communities.”

The issue, he added in a brief interview, was offering a competitive wage to attract and retain a workforce to care for patients.

A social worker who cares for older adults, Bibb, in his remarks to some 50 union members who gathered for the noontime rally, said the issue was a “fair wage” and “a living wage” for “essential workers.”

He said union members planned to rally on May 25 at the state Capitol in Sacramento to urge legislators to consider passage of SB 525.

The union members are, after all, working-class, people who don't have offshore accounts and often rely on their paycheck just to get by. They deserve a fair shake in a land of plenty.