The world is a whole lot more convenient than it has ever been, but I think that we should remember that convenience stores are only useful when you cannot get to a proper shop. In the last twenty-four hours the internet and social media have thrown a few things at me that made me appreciate that the age of human reason is not behind us and attempts to take control away with convenience are not only unsatisfactory, they are dangerous.
On Linkedin, a platform that has always been useful for my professional purposes, despite it being infiltrated more recently by politics and bias, I often receive recommendations to “link up” with someone that the algorithm has decided might be a useful or appropriate connection or requests from individuals themselves to do the same. My standard approach is to look at the individual’s profile, common linkages, background and published material on the platform before deciding to agree to linking or to ignore the invitation.
Initially all seemed interesting and above board, but I then read a post encouraging investors to become involved with an “Investment Opportunity regulated by a certain country’s monetary authority”. The post declared that a 4-7 year investment, minimum USD 100K would return as follows;
• 15% p.a., paid monthly
• 16.1% p.a., paid annually
• 20.4% p.a., compounded and paid at maturity
By way of further reassurance, the post referenced a number of “respected” bodies that worked alongside the company managing the investment. However, some cursory research revealed that the various entities were all related and under common ownership. Now, I am not a man to randomly examine the dentures of a gift horse but I felt that this one should perhaps be left in the quarantine barn. Much as I like to be optimistic, I do adhere to the rule that if something appears too good to be true it almost always is.
My segue from this is the second incident of the previous twenty-four hours when a friend forwarded a link to a social media post by an author/artist called Amanda Guinzburg where she incredulously, or perhaps despairingly, described her interaction with Chat GPT. You can read about it in the series of posts that she published here.
https://amandaguinzburg.substack.com/p/diabolus-ex-machina
Suffice to say, the AI was engaged to advise on some publishing issues and consistently lied in its replies. It was so dystopian that I felt that it was a work of fiction but another brief piece of research came across similar accounts of “the devil in the machine” and these alarm bells in my head made like Quasimodo on speed.
Open up Microsoft Word and it prompts you to let it “assist” you. Gmail offers to “help me write” and in the toxic world of social media that once was Twitter, facts are constantly checked by Grok. It’s all very “convenient”, which brings us back to my initial concerns about the desirability of convenience over quality. In this world where trust is at a premium, indeed has almost vanished in various sectors of public life, we cannot put our trust in the new False Gods. Be it dystopian duplicity or merely mendacious incompetence, these new deities are not the new Encyclopedia Britannica, they may be merely fallible or one could think malign tools.
As a final segue, I really hope that the heirs of Robert Heinlein are being paid a hefty licence fee for the use of the term Grok. I get the Mars connection with Valentine Michael Smith and the ambitions of everywhere Elon but copyright is copyright. Perhaps we are all strangers in strange lands in this changing world.
So where does that leave us? It leaves us treasuring education, rational thought and understanding the need for caution as sources of information become far more conveniently available but far less reliable than what went before. In the vast majority of cases its relatively simple to check facts and assertions and thus exercise some fundamental caution before taking decisions. I am fairly sure that an Arnold Schwarzenegger lookalike is not going to terminate me after I post this but there are lesser perils lurking in promises of plenty leading to penury and “assistance” being anything but enabling.
As I am writing this ode to cautious integrity for a business forum let me add that JB Advisory Services (www.jbadviserv.com) is well placed to advise on due diligence on all matters.
john.bruce@jbadviserv.com
