This is the last thing my brother Jim said to me.
It was the end of a text chain the day before he died – I had sent him an essay on how AI is escaping its sandbox. It could write code to other modules and basically plan its own prison break, making any computer system in the world vulnerable to a malicious bot. Major news networks over the weekend have picked up the story; another AI researcher, Jacob Coxon, quit Anthropic saying it’s ‘crunch time for humanity.’ In ten years time, we could all be extinct! Jim’s response to my fear?
“Chris is this you or a bot?”
I forgot to say how funny my brother was, how he could make me laugh over the absurdity of day to day life. He was Seinfeld before Seinfeld was born. For example, when he got off the plane from MN for the Bride’s wedding, he ended up at UVA’s ER that night for a stroke evaluation. My daughter was a resident at Vandy, but she and her husband had trained at UVA’s med school and were friends with the physicians rotating through the Charlottesville ER. One young doc looked plaintively at my brother, not knowing he was a psychologist, only knowing he was a relative of the Bride, and asked, “When was the last time you felt normal?”
Jim looked over at us with his mischievous eyes and a sly grin. Bob, the Bride and Groom and I all burst out laughing!
Surprisingly, my brother thought AI was the bees knees. He had just signed up for a course on AI management and was using it in his work. His opinion was it was coming whether we liked it or not. It’s a tool, he said, and we better learn how to use it or be left behind. I, on the other hand, hate AI, and I mean Hate. I worry what will happen to the creative class, to children who will never learn how to write a complete sentence, and now unfortunately, I need to add armageddon to my list. But it was not unusual for us to spar intellectually.
I was against the Vietnam War. I saw my friends getting drafted to fight in a conflict we had no business fighting for; coming home maimed and broken. Our step-brother Eric had returned from working on a kibbutz in Israel and felt the same way. When he was drafted Eric refused to carry a gun, and so the Army trained him to be a helicopter pilot. He flew a medevac “Huey” and was one of only two pilots in his unit to survive. I asked him once if he wasn’t safer with a big red cross on the side of his Huey. “It’s more like a target,” he said.
Jim signed up for the war as a matter of honor. A Columbia U graduate, he was always proactive that way, and ended up in Officer Candidate School (OCS) in Georgia. I found his yearbook, yes they published a yearbook of the guys who made it through that grueling program and beside Jim’s picture it said “Infantry”… until someone noticed his score on the final test and rerouted him to Intelligence, probably saving his life.
With a pitstop in California at the Monterey Language School to add Vietnamese to his CV, he shipped out. Jim told me he was mostly partying in the Officer’s Club in a French Colonial building that held daily press briefings journalists called the “Five O’Clock Follies.” Making light of his situation, and not wanting the Flapper to worry I’m sure. He was an Intelligence Officer with a balcony view and sly sense of humor. Later I learned he was briefing generals. Probably interpreting secret documents. He and Eric met up only once over there.
Back at the Bride’s wedding, Jim and Eric sat down in my kitchen and discussed Vietnam for the first time. Two brothers – one who taught me about Motown Soul and the other who introduced me to Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie.
I found Jimmy’s Bronze Star at the back of his closet – for outstanding service against a hostile force in the Republic of Vietnam. He never told anyone that before he returned home for my wedding in 1969 he was awarded the Bronze Star.
I texted back to my brother, “This is me sending you a thing on AI” with a laughing emoji.
Jim loved quoting movies, philosophers and comedians. So of course he quoted Ronald Reagan, “Trust but verify.” I like to think my sister and I influenced him a bit, as his political views became more and more progressive over the years. I’m pretty sure I don’t trust AI. But I always trusted my brother to do the right and proper thing. I watched the Vikings game yesterday and thought about both of my MN brothers – the Vikings GM who stayed home to play with a friend on that July 4th weekend in 1949 when our lives changed forever, and Jim, who saw his mother, grandmother and sister laying on the side of the road unconscious and bleeding. He was only seven years old.
Today my sister Kay turns 92. In this picture from the Bride’s wedding Jim and Kay are sitting in front, Eric and his family are standing in the back to the right, and my Sister-in-Law, Jorja and my niece Lucia, to the left.
MountainMornings 