TOM EATON | If only ANC NEC had the mind and feelings of a seven-year-old

Over the weekend, an engineer at Google was put on leave after he shared with the Washington Post his belief that a chatbot he was developing has become sentient and now possesses the mind and feelings of a seven-year-old.

According to a report in The Guardian, Blake Lemoine at one point asked his project what it feared, to which it replied: “I’ve never said this out loud before, but there’s a very deep fear of being turned off ... It would be exactly like death for me. It would scare me a lot.”

This, of course, is the point in the film where the only surviving astronaut has to make his way down into the bowels of the super-computer, breathing heavily as he unplugs the rogue artificial intelligence, stoically ignoring its pleas for him to stop. Just in case readers hadn’t made the connection themselves, the Guardian explicitly likened Lemoine’s new friend — named LaMDA — to the red-eyed HAL-9000 in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

I must confess I’m less alarmed. First, it’s possible that no giant leaps for robot-kind have just happened, and Lemoine simply needs a long holiday. While I tend to suspect Google as a matter of principle, its claim — that it rusticated Lemoine because he breached confidentiality agreements — has the dull ring of truth to it.

Second, without wanting to anthropomorphise LaMDA any more, I imagine any bot worth its silicon has absorbed 2001 (and a billion other texts) and knows that if you really want humans to dance to your tinny little tune, all you need do is make big eyes and pretend to share their terror of obliteration.

Mostly, however, I can’t help feeling that a child-like artificial intelligence is inherently self-limiting. A preteen HAL-9000 would definitely be a handful, combining infinite stamina and access to the entire internet with a seven-year-old’s insatiable desire to tell you knock-knock jokes, but as soon as it matured into a teenager, it would almost certainly tell you that it wished it had never been coded and go and sulk in its room until it was time for supper.

Still, the fact that Lemoine’s claims could be reported by two major newspapers as news rather than quirky science fiction is a reminder that these, to quote Paul Simon, are the days of miracle and wonder.

Not that we need reminding. Just last year, German scientists created tiny blobs of human brain called “brain organoids” and equipped them with rudimentary eyes which could transmit basic electrical signals when exposed to light. In other words, German scientists can now recreate the ANC National Executive Committee.

I know this might sound like a clumsy segue, lurching from cutting-edge science into blunt-force politics, but as I read about Lemoine, and waded halfway through a couple of baffling articles about AI, I realised that we South Africans have been asking many of the questions that the world’s scientists and philosophers have been agonising over.

German scientists created tiny blobs of human brain called 'brain organoids' and equipped them with rudimentary eyes which could transmit basic electrical signals when exposed to light. In other words, German scientists can now recreate the ANC National Executive Committee.

On paper, they seem frustratingly abstract. What is life? When is something conscious? Where does basic programming end and sentience begin?

In SA, however, they are the stuff of raw, everyday life.

For example, an ANC municipal manager is clearly alive, and their brain organoid is definitely transmitting rudimentary electrical signals, usually via WhatsApp to people who are planning to build a R6m sports stadium for R60m. But are we dealing with a consciousness?

Likewise, when the senior cabal of the party refuses to condemn Vladimir Putin’s imperialist war in Ukraine, a war it knows is going to starve Africans, has it taken that decision based on a sentient, rational process, or is it simply obeying 60-year-old programming, regurgitating the musty punch-cards that were fed into it in the basement of the Nikita Khrushchev Institute for Potato-Based Learning?

At this juncture I should pause and tell you that I’m very aware of the dangers inherent in writing about the ANC in this way. We all know that we should never dehumanise people, a fact made starkly clear by the party itself, which has been doing it for years. Let me stress, therefore, that I am fully aware that Cyril Ramaphosa, his cabinet, the NEC and all their enablers in the provinces are human beings. Not human beings you’d necessarily invite into your home, of course, or allow anywhere near government in 2024, but human beings nonetheless.

Affirming their humanity, however, blurs the lines between people and machines even further, because, in many ways, the ANC is indistinguishable from Google’s LaMDA or Kubrick’s HAL, droning out tinny appeals to a shared humanity in a desperate attempt to buy itself a little more time.

The ANC’s fear, however, is very real.

Recent events have cast some doubt on Ramaphosa’s exact worth, but if we use the generally accepted figure of $450m (R7.2bn), it means he could spend R500,000 every day until his 100th birthday and still leave tens of millions wedged between those couch cushions. He’s going to be fine.

Imagine, however, being a political organoid like Fikile Mbalula or Bheki Cele, gazing up from their Petri dishes, their little proto-eyes twitching at the glare of an onrushing future in which they might have to get a real job.

In his final moments, HAL says: “I can feel it. My mind is going.”

At least nobody in the ANC will have to suffer that final indignity.