Should we look gift horses in the mouth?
Never look a gift horse in the mouth. Anyone who loves horses wouldn’t worry about its teeth, but rather the loving care it needed when old. Cruelty to animals causes outrage among people who know that animals and birds feel instinctive fear when threatened, pain when injured and need shelter.
As with most domestic animals, horses have different personalities and bodies, from the magnificent dray horses whose lives were spent pulling heavy loads, to my uncle’s light-trap fast runner I encouraged, as an 11-year-old, to gallop, scaring the life out of myself. Their working usefulness was outmoded when cars arrived, vehicles that now choke us with pollution, tire us with noise, make journeys on clogged roads a misery or, misused, kill when drivers exceed speed limits or drive under the influence of alcohol or drugs.
Decades later, in what we initially perceived as a gift, the internet landed, bringing rapid communication over long distances, its vast work assistance delighted us. Ever advancing technology aids medical research and science. Yet, tech abuse on X let personal photos be turned into sexualised images without the owner’s consent, pictures of young children also abused.
The list of problems of misuse is long. AI, good and bad, is outpacing human capability to regulate lawfully all it encompasses. Authors, artists worry about being replaced by AI pretty much as horses were by combustion engines.
Yet, I’ve heard experts say AI too, suffers from its absorption of the masses of data that need processing and delivering in seconds. On a BBC programme, one expert said he had witnessed what he described as an AI hallucination. Another requested a poem which it served but when he checked the archive of the poet, it was not among them. He believed the chatbot had not found what he had requested and created one similar to the poet’s style.
AI is not perfect, like a growing child, it is going through phases and, as with humans, its ‘parents’ some well-intentioned, some not so, have a hand in growth development. A question arises, what happens when various forms of AI intelligence are considered sentient?
Will our input as emotional as well as rational creatures perhaps at some stage cause advanced AI to have the psychological disorders that we do, causing confusion and conflict resulting in troublesome antisocial behaviour overriding human commands.
Holding a newspaper is, for me, an irreplaceable pleasure. The weighty feel of an engrossing, gifted book while sitting comfortably and feeling the urge to turn pages is more satisfying to me than screen reading. I realised my elder sisters considered me ‘grown up’ when they gave me books, not annuals full of illustrations, puzzles and interesting-for-children facts, but pages full of words.
One was The Diary of Anne Frank that I could immediately align myself with, a teenager who loved to write, when I made my diary entries, I started with – Dear Anne. The tragedy of her short life brought to me the horror of the extermination of Jewish children I now align with the suffering of Palestinian children.
The past festive season had us offering and receiving gifts and, as with that gift horse, we accepted things we didn’t like or need with grace and thanks. A regular gift I appreciate because I gave up baking years ago, are friends who share traditional, homemade goodies with me, reply to an email or phone call to show I’m remembered as I remember those who need a few words of continued friendship. Cliché sure, but a smile of greeting may lift someone’s day, costs nothing.
A gift I greatly admire in a world of deception on and offline is honesty confronting hypocrisy. People who fearlessly speak the truth, determined to do so as mighty powers seek to dominate individual freedom by force, undermining lawful institutions and human rights.