Computers compute

In a short novel I wrote about 20 years ago, there’s a scene where Eric K. (the protagonist, a private detective) and his best friend Patrick Z. (a hacker), are approaching the investigation from different angles. There’s a bit of banter between them, then Patrick ends the conversation dismissively, hinting that there’s work to do and they’re just wasting time. “Off you go,” he says to Eric, “As they say, You’re a detective, go detect. I’ll stay here with my machines. [a beat] They’re computers, they’ll compute.” I was reminded of this exchange when thinking about the current phenomenon of so-called ‘AI psychosis’, where people, believing the many lies of the ‘AI’ industry, think that now computers and other computing devices are capable of thinking, reasoning, understanding, remembering and learning from our ‘conversations’ and their training, and so on and so forth. They aren’t. There is no intelligence involved behind the blanket term that ‘AI’ has become today. Large Language…