There’s a story making the rounds being touted as a reason to ridicule the Trump Administration and it involves the State Department map of Africa. I suppose the ridicule of the administration and the State Department is fully deserved. That being said, the State Department map of Africa exposes a much deeper and more dangerous problem.

People on one political side use this to poke fun while those on the other side scramble to make excuses; the much larger issue is the source of the terrible map and the consequences coming for all of us. The map was generated by a so-called AI tool and that’s an enormous canary in the coal mine for us all.

What is the State Department Map of Africa?

The State Department map of Africa was presented in a slide show given during a conference in Brazil. It identified six countries in Africa incorrectly, not only in location but in the actual shape of the countries. Ha, ha, say Democrats, what a bunch of losers, can’t even make a map. It was just a staffer who made a stupid mistake claim the Republicans.

Republicans are lying and Democrats are missing the point. The problem is that we as a nation and as a world are relying more and more on so-called AI to complete tasks for us and it sucks at them. It’s bad at its job and arguably only getting worse.

So-called AI is Dangerously Stupid

So-called AI is learning from terrible sources, often other so-called AI, and objectively becoming less reliable, and by less reliable, I mean dangerously unreliable. Despite its demonstrable inability to create a simple map, we are using it more and more. People are being fired from all sorts of jobs which are being turned over to so-called AI for a variety of reasons, mainly to do with throwing good money after bad.

Don’t get me wrong here, so-called AI has useful applications but the State Department map of Africa demonstrates a critical problem. So-called AI is now being used to program security software, passenger airplanes, military hardware, and so much more. Its Cthulhu-esque tentacles are in everything and we are relying on it more every day, every hour, every minute, every second.

Conclusion

We say, ha-ha, look at the stupid map of Africa AI made but are we going to be laughing as hard when some mission critical software fails? When a plane falls out of the sky? When a tanker carrying hazardous material slams ashore?

Call me an alarmist, call me Chicken Little, call me what you will; but I’m telling you, we are on a dangerous path and the powers that be are cracking the whip for more speed.

Tom Liberman