A.I. Cannot Imagine - It's Not Intelligent!

There is no intelligence in A.I. and there will never be

Imagination is the purest manifestation of intelligence.

Geniuses imagine what nobody conceived.

In the world of technology, there are coders and software architects who are 10x better than anyone else.

In sales and marketing, there are those who have talent beyond their peers.

Then there is the person who hits infinity-level-better - he or she sees a way to deliver outcomes nobody ever imagined.

That is not what A.I. does.

A.I. may deliver combinations of words and outcomes nobody saw before - because nobody ever ran their brain index quite that way.

A.I. “trains” on human models so it generally knows the guardrails - both logical and grammatical - to deliver a response that appears reasonable.

That is not insight - it is the recombination of human responses - at machine speed.

The absolute mindless nonsense that A.I. is an “existential threat” to humanity is so preposterous only politicians, podcasters and venture capital firms believe it.

For example:

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2025/03/war-rooms-steve-bannon-discusses-dr-naomi-wolf/

For those of us doing A.I. for 40 years, the difference today as opposed to 10 years ago is everyone thinks they know all about A.I. because they logged onto ChatGPT, asked a question - and were given a response by a big database with an agile index.

You get much the same from Siri and Alexa.

A.I. today is nothing more than the evolution of what we have been doing for 40 years.

There is no such thing as “artificial” intelligence.

All A.I. can do is mimic what a human would do within the same domain when asked the same question.

A.I. cannot imagine.

If you cannot imagine, you are not intelligent. That applies to people too.

Artificial intelligence cannot imagine anything.

Thus the quote attributed to Albert Einstein “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”

Imagination creates.

A.I. returns answers from large databases.

A.I. large language models have tons of information - they have zero imagination.

Imagination renders the creation of a new concept, one often without a predecessor - and there isn’t a coder on earth who can write that script.

The only imagination going on in the A.I. Bubble is the venture capital community believing it can pump up A.I. startups - like it did with cloud security companies, DevOps companies - make them unicorns (no revenue but worth billions) and flip them.

A.I. is nothing more than a ton of data, with a lot of things that look like indices, being processed super fast to mimic exactly what a model tells it a human would do.

That is why A.I. generally sucks and everyone reading this post - who has had to deal with an A.I. - powered chat on a website - experienced A.I. - and it ain’t that great.

Almost every person - mostly guys - on this Substack has encountered an A.I. driven system when you called customer service. You ended up screaming into the phone “….give me a F*@king human!” You’ve done this - do not hide it.

That is A.I.

If the database is not populated with the specific answer to your question - into the queue you go - punching keys endlessly until that cave man scream.

Companies, services and products put “powered by A.I.” on the logo and nobody questions what that means.

The most artificial thing about A.I. is the name itself.

Call something “intelligent,” tie it to high tech and people believe the bullshit that A.I. will one day write its own programs, from scratch, to make you a slave like the Eloi in the Time Machine movie.

Let’s do a little experiment.

Instead of calling it A.I., let’s call it what it is - a very big database, running really, really fast, building an index of what people would likely do, say or react to if given the same input.

I know that’s long so let’s call it a super indexed database for expected responses.

Do you think the world is going to be taken over by “A SUPER INDEXED DATABASE FOR EXPECTED RESPONSES?”

See how stupid you sound reading that out loud?

Call one of your buds and say it “hey Clyde, I am having trouble sleeping because I think my job is going to be taken over by super indexed databases.”

You won’t do it because you know how stupid it sounds.

It’s the term A.I. that makes it a thing. It’s not the reality of what A.I. does.

So let’s go with super indexed database for expected responses - let’s play with that a bit.

The “SUPER INDEXED DATABASE FOR EXPECTED RESPONSES” is going to impact low level, repetitive jobs.

If you answer a phone all day, from a specific type of customer, indexed databases will take your job.

Because your job ain’t that hard.

And your job requires zero imagination.

The farther away from imagination is the job, the more susceptible it is to being replaced by a computer. That does not mean A.I. - that means a computer.

Ever hear of LegalZoom?

For years you had to go to a lawyer for a will, trust, things like that. LegalZoom took a huge bite out of that market - but was it A.I.?

They did not call it A.I. because they did it 15 years ago before the A.I. madness started. But it works, people love it and it shows super indexed databases in the legal field yield expected responses.

Those complex legal responses are well regarded.

And they didn’t call it A.I. - although they may now because everything is A.I.

Wills and trusts don’t need a lot of imagination. Thus, they are automated - in this case without A.I.

How about medical advice?

Certainly basic medical diagnoses will be answered by super indexed databases. Let’s do one.

I have a fever of 101. I am sweating, sore throat, coughing, post nasal drip, starting to get into my lungs - a super indexed database can diagnose that pretty easily.

What it won’t do is write you the prescription - that has to be a human. First, it’s the law and second nobody is going to bet on giving a prescription to someone because a chatbot made the call!

If the guy dies, the super indexed legal database will then file the super indexed complaint and first discovery letter, but when it comes time to do the deposition, the human lawyer shows up.

Depositions require insight, response to subtle physical and verbal cues, and the A.I. developer cannot write that into a script.

People who do repetitive tasks - requiring no imagination, no human insight will be replaced by a computer.

You may not like that, but it didn’t start with A.I.

You will find people-intensive labor replaced by capital intensive investment (today A.I.) for thousands of years.

What didn’t get replaced?

Imagination, insight from few facts, discovery through serendipity - none of these has ever - and will ever - be replaced by anything non-human. Not by A.I. and not by machine learning.

We are entering a world where technology magnifies the value of those with imagination - starting a company, creating art, music.

These tools make the imagineers better at what they do - while eliminating repetitive jobs for those lacking imagination.

A company can now be started by a couple of imagineers - and the grunt work of basic writing, marketing, low level sales reach outs - can all be done with A.I.

We know that, because here at Fractal we are doing it right now.

A small, intense group of fewer than 50 people can have an impact beyond what a current software company - of thousands - can have - because they use obsolete technology and are burdened with large, not-too-bright work forces.

The imagineers who founded those legacy software firms are long gone - doing yoga on the beach in Maui - and the remainders - salary types who do forecasts, marketing meetings and quarterly business reviews remain - to be taken out by new imagineers.

A.I. is great for low imagination tasks - and without the need for a data center - we can use it everywhere!

A.I. or SUPER INDEXED DATABASES FOR EXPECTED RESPONSES make imagineers more productive than ever while making the repetitive taskers worth less.

Those doing rote work, as history shows, will be kicked to the curb.

That’s how life works and why people with an education keep their kids from working manual labor as a career choice.

Start a plumbing or electrical company, build houses - all are imagineering endeavors.

Working on a dock, putting canisters on ships - will eventually be replaced and society will be better off while a small group of workers will not.

The A.I. world - at least the U.S. contingent preached they needed data centers coast to coast to meet the incredible demand of large language models.

Podcasters, news types, politicos believed them without question.

In Virginia today, the government is trying to pass laws to attract more data centers than any other state.

Then the Chinese guys showed with DeepSeek they could do everything the Americans could do in a small data center. Ouch!

We, the Fractal guys took the voter rolls of 20 states - each of which requires a data center to run it - and put all 20 on a computer you can hold in your hand - using less power than a microwave oven.

We proved data centers are dinosaurs - and whether the venture capital community likes it or not, once someone proves data centers can be replaced by 4 - inch computing cubes - from us and others - the die is cast.

We do A.I. and have for decades.

Stop believing the news types.

They never built an A.I. application.

Stop believing podcasters who are looking to get their podcast viewed.

Start asking questions.

If A.I. is so good, why can’t you cancel a subscription - encounter a chatbot driven by A.I. which does not have a single useful answer to your question?

Why, several times a year, do you scream into your phone :…get me a human” because the most elementary question cannot be handled?

A.I. cannot think, it cannot imagine and it cannot invent.

A.I. is here to stay - and for those of us using it for decades, welcome to the party.

Don’t worry that A.I. is going to take over the planet and run everything in your or your kids’ lifetime.

A SUPER INDEXED DATABASE FOR EXPECTED RESPONSES - still cannot make a simple change to your magazine or music subscription - so it’s not going to deliver world peace or make war.

FractalComputing Substack is a newsletter about the journey of taking a massively disruptive technology to market. We envision a book about our journey so each post is a way to capture some fun events.

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Jay@FractalWeb.App

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