OPINION: Searching for a practical use for AI

All this talk about artificial intelligence is a bit unsettling.

Sure, in time, it will bring a lot of good to the world, particularly in medicines, finding and treating cancers, improving weather forecasting, eliminating boring and repetitive work, answering questions and researching data faster than humanly possible.

It also will make it easier to cheat on school homework and copy (and steal) someone else’s creative ideas. It will add to the loss of privacy, eliminate jobs and make people overly dependent on computers to manage their lives. As if smartphones and social media weren’t enough of a threat to that.

But I think all the handwringing over the risks and ills of AI, measured against all those potential future benefits, misses a tremendous immediate value to society: Political leaders could use AI to avoid stupid mistakes.

Think about it. Artificial intelligence really is pretty simple. It’s a big vacuum, sort of like a customized Roomba on steroids with a massive memory bank that sweeps every computer drive in the cloud, sorts out and catalogs the good stuff — while also sucking up the trash — filling the digital equivalent of big blue recycling bins for later use.

The search-and-recall functions of an AI system could be programmed to find every lousy decision by elected officials going back as far as recorded history, assuming someone wrote a book about it that a bot can read.

No doubt the list of poor choices is longer than the litany of excuses offered by students for missed homework. But if AI can solve the homework problem for millions of students, computers should be able to rescue political candidates and elected officials from their own self-inflicted mistakes.

Even better, AI will provide recommendations that many staff members to presidents, governors and legislators would be too afraid to deliver. Computer servers have no emotion, no need to make their bosses look good — no need to worry about elections. The artificial voice would tell the truth that politicians need to hear.

Think of the answers AI would cough up if Donald Trump asked: “What happens if elected officials refuse to admit they lost the election and threaten to destroy democracy for their own ego?” AI software would cost a lot less money than what Trump might pay his attorneys to answer this question: “Give me a list of people convicted for cheating on their taxes.”

Former U.S. Rep. George Santos could have (and should have) asked Alexa, or whichever AI still talks to him, “Please check my resume for accuracy and honesty before I post it on my job-search website?” Of course, that assignment might have overloaded the system’s computing power.

In Alaska, the fervent supporters of a large Permanent Fund dividend at the expense of other needs in our communities could ask AI to calculate the overdraft charges people would incur if they start spending the political-campaign-promised PFDs that never show.

Legislators — and the governor — who are reluctant to fully support public education could ask what happens to societies that fail to educate their children for jobs. And what happens to the businesses that need those new workers?

Alaska’s attorney general could try asking his favorite AI provider: “Was law school a good investment if I would rather spend my time fighting social wars on books, schools, transgender issues and other political headline causes?”

With questions like those, even the strongest of AI servers would need emotional counseling. I bet there is software for that.

Larry Persily is a longtime Alaska journalist, with breaks for federal, state and municipal public policy work in Alaska and Washington, D.C. He lives in Anchorage and is publisher of the Wrangell Sentinel weekly newspaper.

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