What Dealing with A.I. Really Feels Like, According to Mike Judge

He predicted A.I.'s relative ridiculousness in his prescient movie "Idiocracy"

I finally used A.I. to cheat.

It was a high pressure situation. I was signing two of my children up for a major disc-golf tournament, which was going to fill up quickly, and I didn’t know that to sign up, you had to take a rules test.

It’s a ridiculous 25-question test, multiple-choice, that requires you to comb through the Official Rules of Disc Golf. I discovered, minutes before signing up for the tournament, that each registrant had to take this test.

It was late at night. My brain failed to comprehend questions about arcane situations involving caddies throwing discs to spectators while drinking beverages that looked like beer — yes, one of the questions was basically about this.

So I copied and pasted the questions and multiple-choice answers into ChatGPT and Perplexity. Within a second, each engine gave me what it claimed to be the right answer. To pass the test, you had to get 80% or higher.

Well, the engines failed — they got 19 out of 25 questions right. That was good, but not good enough, just short of the required 80%.

(Reader, please ponder this example and just extrapolate it out to the total wreckage that A.I. systems promise for the current educational system. I teach for a living. Nobody, in my view, still knows what kinds of complete changes are coming. We do know that any test or prompt that human instructor can make, that AI can *seem* to give valid answers to, which is good enough for any student, especially the desperate.)

Anyway, my point with this test example is that A.I. seems amazing, for now.

As my X feed testifies, A.I. might solve all problems in ten to twenty years. E.g. “medical diagnoses will be enhanced; your cancer will be caught earlier than ever.”

I see these claims repeatedly. More and more, I believe they are investment boosterism run amok. The venture capitalists backing this stuff have a lot at stake, so they are marketing the hell out of it.

Everything “A.I.” is now involved in a global propaganda war, with big money behind it. That’s my heuristic for all talk about A.I. from here on.

That’s also why I’ve played up the negative side of A.I. here recently. Almost all of my interactions with it in the past two months have been, in short, pretty stupid.

Take Google’s “A.I. Overview,” which it now puts at the top of every search you make with Google. There hasn’t been one time when, searching about topics I know at least a little about, that Google’s A.I. has been right.

Most of the time, it says the stupidest things imaginable.

I’ve tried this search every other day for weeks: “Tell me which NBA players have never made a 3-pointer.” I wanted to see if Google’s A.I. can give a right answer. It never has.

In my view, most humans, with adaptable and organic neural-networked brains, can figure out that probably I am asking about current players who have played awhile. I am not, of course, asking about Oscar Robertson, who played before the 3-point line was instituted in the NBA in 1979.

But Michael Jordan never made a 3-pointer?!?

Here’s Google, one of the so-called “Magnificent Seven” in stock terms, offering us the dopiest nonsense as a hyped product that represents them.

Would you want something so manifestly stupid representing you?

If we were all consistent, every consumer would stop using Google immediately. I admit, I’m not consistent myself.

Also, Google presumably is against “misinformation,” which is why they’ve likely been involved in various necessary and unnecessary censoring on their platforms. They label any Youtube video, for example, if it contains a disreputable conspiracy theory, even if that video debunks the theory.

I’ve even seen them block debunking videos because they are worried about misinformation contained within those videos.

And yet they are spreading misinformation with the hyped deployment of their search-engine A.I., orders of magnitude more misinformation than normies could ever do.

I could go on and on about the downsides of A.I., including my interactions with chatbots for companies I deal with, who can’t figure out what a “refund” is or how to process it.

That’s where we are for now.

When I said all this to my wife, she responded wisely: “But all of this could get better in time.”

That’s what we all hope.

But to me the equivalent is some phony salesman in 1900 telling me that he can give me a transatlantic flight with his newfangled flying machine rigged with feathers. Google’s plane, as it were, repeatedly crashes and burns. Who in the world would fly their not-so-friendly skies?

This ties into films, of which there’s been a great number of good ones about malaise with newer technology. “The Mitchell Vs. the Machines,” on Netflix, is one of the best to playfully castigate Google and all of social media.

Long before that was Mike Judge, king of depicting American stupidity. In his amazing 2006 satire “Idiocracy,” he’s crafted a scene that wasn’t meant to directly criticize A.I., yet by 2025 standards, it does exactly that.

Watch this one carefully, please.

The main character, played by Luke Wilson, finds himself waking up in the year 2505, when everything has gotten dumber and crasser. Somehow, in this future society, they still have functioning tech. But it’s as dumb as its populace.

It’s also something of a police state. The character here has to be ID’ed, including getting a barcode tattoo on his wrist.

His interaction with the computer system is now priceless:

This is pretty much what happens when an evolved organic neural-network — the gloriously designed human brain — meets up with a pattern-recognition machine built on 0s and 1s.

If the machine controls the brain, you get stupid, petty tyrannies galore.

With the machine in the clip, tThere’s no listening, no adaptability, and — as Martin Heidegger would definitely observe — no *care*.

The machine simply cannot ever care about anything, really and truly. It can only seem like it does, as its voice inflections try to indicate. But it will do as it’s programmed, however richly and mathematically amazing A.I. is composed.

And that means it cannot treat humans with the full dignity that other humans can, including friends, family, and customer service with proper ethical views.

I have no idea if A.I. will get better or not. I hope so.

We know it will be used to game systems, as I did with my disc-golf rules test. It will be used to gain efficiencies, which might send stock prices soaring and will line the pockets of venture capitalists.

We have no idea if it will ever care about and for us.

So far, nope.