THE JOHN ADAMS SOCIETY
William G. Carpenter Mark S. Sanquist Christopher Wolff Marina Wolff
Chairman Secretary Chief Whip Chancellor
March 15, 2023
Location: Burger Moe’s, St. Paul
You can’t fix stupid, not even with duct tape.
— unknown
CHATGPT CAN "CONVERSE" WELL ENOUGH TO seem human; it can write essays that pass for the work of college students (supporters of AI claim this is an achievement); it can write functioning computer programs, and even write poems praising Joe Biden (but not any poem praising Donald Trump – apparently artificial intelligence has some limits). AI will finish the job of making all Americans unemployed. First we moved manufacturing jobs to Mexico and China, but that was OK because all those displaced workers could just learn to code computer programs. Now AI will take those jobs, too.
What will become of Americans once everything is designed by the “cloud” and made in China? With no U.S. jobs in manufacturing, product design or computer programming, we will all work in customer support centers and become dependent on government handouts. As long as Emperor Xi Jinping continues to buy U.S. bonds, our fearless leader Brandon can keep our handouts coming. When our only national export is government bonds that we promise to pay off some decades from now, China will cut us off. Once that happens, we will be lost. On the plus side, this will probably reduce illegal immigration.
ON THE OTHER HAND, AI still requires human guidance. A self-driving car requires a human to tell it where to drive to. ChatGPT can write a computer program, but cannot decide what program to write. However “intelligent” our technology seems, it waits for a human to give it a goal, to request a program, and to specify what the program should do. To see how important and necessary that human guidance is, remember the last time you called a customer service hotline. If your problem wasn’t one of the most common problems, you had to go through endless menus to talk to a real person. That phone menu system was designed by a human; a phone menu system created by AI will be worse. AI cannot answer your question until some human tells the AI what questions might be asked, and what the answers are. AI can be a valuable advance in our technology, but its value will only be as good as the human direction that guides it.
THE CHAIRMAN, having reached the end of his phone menus looking for an answer, has called for a debate to settle the question:
RESOLVED: AI Will Bury You!
The Debate will be held on Wednesday, March 15, 2023, at Burger Moe’s, 242 West 7th Street, St. Paul, MN 55102.
The Chancellor and Chairman encourage people to arrive before 7 o’clock p.m. and to thank our host venue by spending money while partaking of food and drink. The debate will begin at half past seven.
Gentlemen who wish to speak must wear a tie, and ladies are asked to uphold a similar sartorial standard. For gentlemen arriving sans tie yet wishing to discourse on the resolution, the Purveyor of Ties will have on hand several from his remarkable collection. Questions regarding caucus procedures or about the John Adams Society may be directed to the Chairman at (651) 398-9316 or the Secretary at (612) 703-6021.