We live in confusing times: times defined by terms that everyone all the time is expected to talk about, but which no one at all ever defines. In such a time, it can be sadly easy for ordinary people to feel like the little girl who wrote to the newspaper asking about the rumors of the non-existence of Santa Claus.
Many of us spend our time these days asking, in one form or another, the question: Is there a Santa Claus? Or, in other words: What do the disturbing, unsettling rumors discussed by my peers actually mean? Are my parents actually lying to me? Is there a conspiracy? How deep does it go? And most of the time, the people answering the question answer only by subtly, deceptively redefining their terms, just like the New York Sun did to poor Virginia O'Hanlon in 1897: Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus in the sense that love and generosity and devotion exist which I know is not what you meant at all and is going to confuse you terribly but what you have to understand is that it will make other adults like me in the know feel affirmed as we continue to keep our terrible secret from you but you are a child and have no choice but to submit to such treatment until you are older and can do it to others.
At The Adventures of Captain Peabody, though, we would never, ever, ever treat you like that! We know that you have questions, say, about what caused the Soviet Union to fall, or what happened in the year 2016, or whether there is a contemporary crisis in Catholic ethics, or whether Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey is a sign of the times, or whether I am in fact a loyal adherent of the Indie Movement, or What Went Wrong, and we strive to answer those questions as simply and accurately and truthfully as we possibly can.
So, to all the poor confused people out there watching as our society and world transform from a hyper-techno-optimism to a conceptually confused techno-pessimism, I wish to offer this relatively-brief-by-my-standards summary for you. You are reading articles and listening to podcasts and watching people in the GroupMe rant about AI and technology and how it's either going to establish a universal benevolent reign of leisure or end the world, and you wonder: but what is AI? What is technology? But when you ask the smart people, they just tell you that AI is a future super-intelligence that will imprison us all in a Laplacean Hell and also that chatbot that told you it was in love with you or that technology is just when you use a toothbrush and also an inevitable natural process impossible to resist or, in short, I know this is going to confuse you terribly but it will make other people like me in the know feel affirmed as we continue to keep our terrible secret from you but you are a normal person and have no choice but to submit to such treatment until you get a podcast or a tech startup and can do it to others.
Captain Peabody, though, would never treat you like that--and the rumors of his war crimes in WW2 are just that, rumors. So let me just tell you what technology is and what AI is.
