Letter to the Editor: Bravo to Trang-Linh Nguyen’s for her March 11th Opinion piece: The AI Question Amherst Cannot Afford to Ignore

Environmental activist Ed Abby shot his television set. 

D. H. Lawrence hated everything mechanical about humans, especially their machines. 

Henry David Thoreau decried the system that “makes men the tools of their tools.”

AI is well on its way to becoming the new God of humanity, but I will never submit to its obscene power.

“Resist much, obey little!” said Walt Whitman.

Thank you, Trang-Linh Nguyen ’29, for your March 11 opinion piece titled, “The AI Question Amherst Cannot Afford to Ignore.” I salute you for your warning that “the techno-tyrants — Silicon Valley figures who have spent a decade consolidating power over information infrastructure while growing openly contemptuous of democratic constraints — are building the most powerful AI systems humanity has ever produced. They are not waiting for the rest of us to catch up.” 

And thank you, Trang-Linh, for your questions:

“Who is supposed to counter them? Who is asking what this technology means for being human? Who is thinking about what it does to how we learn, how we relate to each other, how we understand truth, how we grieve, how we make meaning? Who is thinking about what it means for every field of knowledge beyond computer science?” 

And also for your impassioned plea that “we need to be in the loop ...to insist that the people designing these systems are not the only people who get to decide what they’re for.

As to your timely observation that “the conventional path is no longer the safe path ...” and that “if the ground is shifting anyway, you might as well pursue the thing that actually matters to you,” I salute these encouraging words.

And when you say to “... do more art. Draw more, sing more. Write more poetry and prose, and music,” I offer a resounding YES!!! And “yes” also when you implore us to “reaffirm our humanity through creative work that cannot be reduced to optimization, that insists on meaning and beauty and the irreducible texture of human experience.” With this in mind, I urge everyone who cares about the human being remaining human to read a short story called “The Future Is a Click Away” by Allegra Hyde from her 2023 short story collection, “The Last Catastrophe.”  It begins like this:

“The algorithm knew the timing of our periods. It knew when and if we’d marry. Whether we’d have kids. It knew how we’d die. It knew where we went, why we lingered, why we left.  It knew what seemed unknowable: the hidden chambers of our hearts. When it sent us tampons in the mail, we took them. We paid.

We were a matrix of a billion-trillion data points. The algorithm had them all.”

And finally, thank you most of all, Trang-Linh Nguyen, for co-leading AI Safety at Amherst, and the AI policy governance reading groups dedicated to bringing more interdisciplinary thinkers at Amherst into this conversation.

Jim Knight ’69