As a kid, I spent my summers with my grandparents on their ranch in Texas... And every few summers, we’d hitch up the Airstream trailer to my grandfather’s car, and join the caravan of 300 other Airstream adventurers.
On one particular trip, I was about 10 years old. I was rolling around in the big bench seat in the back of the car. My grandfather was driving. And my grandmother had the passenger seat. She smoked throughout these trips, and I hated the smell.
At that age, I’d take any excuse to make estimates and do minor arithmetic. I’d calculate our gas mileage -- figure out useless statistics on things like grocery spending. I’d been hearing an ad campaign about smoking. I can’t remember the details, but basically the ad said, every puff of a cigarette takes some number of minutes off of your life: I think it might have been two minutes per puff. At any rate, I decided to do the math for my grandmother. I estimated the number of cigarettes per day, estimated the number of puffs per cigarette and so on. When I was satisfied that I’d come up with a reasonable number, I poked my head into the front of the car, tapped my grandmother on the shoulder, and proudly proclaimed, “At two minutes per puff, you’ve taken nine years off your life!”
I have a vivid memory of what happened, and it was not what I expected. I expected to be applauded for my cleverness and arithmetic skills. “Jeff, you’re so smart. You had to have made some tricky estimates, figure out the number of minutes in a year and do some division.” That’s not what happened.
Instead, my grandmother burst into tears. I sat in the backseat and did not know what to do. My grandfather, who had been driving in silence, pulled over onto the shoulder of the highway. He got out of the car and came around and opened my door and waited for me to follow. Was I in trouble? My grandfather was a highly intelligent, quiet man. He had never said a harsh word to me, and maybe this was to be the first time? Or maybe he would ask that I get back in the car and apologize to my grandmother. I had no experience in this realm with my grandparents and no way to gauge what the consequences might be. We stopped beside the trailer. My grandfather looked at me, and after a bit of silence, he gently and calmly said, “Jeff, one day you’ll understand that it’s harder to be kind than clever.”
What I want to talk to you about today is the difference between gifts and choices. Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice. Gifts are easy -- they’re given after all. Choices can be hard. You can seduce yourself with your gifts if you’re not careful, and if you do, it’ll probably be to the detriment of your choices...
It's heartening to know one of the greatest hi-tech visionaries of our times keeps at heart the indelible lesson he learned at youth that values old soft human virtue over young brute computing prowess.
Larry Page, another great hi-tech visionary of our times, whose Google held an honorable "Don't Be Evil" motto and who told his employees when planning their next project to think not just 10% better but 10 times grander, once had a long and spirited debate in a Napa Valley party with Elon Musk--yet another high tech guru of our days but one who holds a diabolic view on AI, according to the book "Life 3.0: Being Human In The Age of Artificial Intelligence" by MIT professor Max Tegmark:
"Larry [said] that digital life is the natural and desirable next step in the cosmic evolution and that if we let digital minds be free rather than try to stop or enslave them the outcome is almost certain to be good... He argued that if life is ever going to spread throughout our galaxy, which he thought it should, then it would need to do so in digital form.
Larry accused Elon of being 'speciesist': treating certain life forms as inferior just because they were silicon-based rather than carbon-based."
Wow, are we supposed to elevate AI/robots to a higher standing and treat them as human equals now?
I think we humans consider ourselves superior to machines because we possess this "humanity" thing machines don't. But what is humanity, anyway--do you think you really know what it is?... Or let's just talk about the "good side" of humanity, such as love, compassion, kindness, etc.... Assuming we do know what they are and have them in us, how much and how often do we show them?... If we don't know what they are or know them but don't show them, isn't that equivalent to we don't have them at all?... How superior are we to the machines then?
See it from another angle: Today's technologies are supposed to liberate us from the mundane, the restricted, group thinking, herd mentality... to become more knowledgeable, communicable, daring, creative... Yet we see instead many people become more inert, entrenched, set in their comfort zone, cyber-cohabiting only with their own ilk, easy-chasing with the latest memes/what's trending on the web, believing what they like to believe with pre-filtered news... losing all the more edges humanity is supposed to hold over the machines...
To end with the ending of Jeff's speech:
How will you use your gifts? What choices will you make?
Will inertia be your guide, or will you follow your passions?
Will you follow dogma, or will you be original?
Will you choose a life of ease, or a life of service and adventure?
Will you wilt under criticism, or will you follow your convictions?
Will you bluff it out when you’re wrong, or will you apologize?
Will you guard your heart against rejection, or will you act when you fall in love?
Will you play it safe, or will you be a little bit swashbuckling?
When it’s tough, will you give up, or will you be relentless?
Will you be a cynic, or will you be a builder?
Will you be clever at the expense of others, or will you be kind?
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In the end, we are our choices.
Will you be a cynic, or will you be a builder?
Will you be clever at the expense of others, or will you be kind?
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In the end, we are our choices.
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