San-serif fonts seem to be de rigeuer these days, which is supposed to be good for people with certain visual impairments. It’s bad for people with other impairments, and it’s not great for anyone to be unable to distinguish between lower-case L and upper case i.

This latter difficulty keeps getting me every time I see a headline about Artificial Intelligence, also known as AI. I often find myself asking “Who’s Al?” Even people in Silicon Valley who stand to benefit financially from wider adoption of Artificial Intelligence, whom you would expect to be big boosters of the technology, have a tendency to say that it will result in the creation of a permanent underclass, unless that is it triggers the extinction of the human race, which they assure us is a definite possibility. Moreover, we all know people who put their names on writing or imagery or music generated by Artificial Intelligence and behave as if they had made it themselves, as if they were sitting in front of a player piano and grinning with pride as if they were making the music themselves. Even schools and universities, which you might expect to have a professional obligation to take such people gently but firmly by the hand and explain to them that they are making themselves ridiculous, often embrace this bizarre idiocy and encourage or even force their students and faculty members to emulate it. And whether the technology in fact threatens to annihilate labor as a factor of production and wage-earning as an element of our socio-economic system, there is no doubt that it is already automating away whole categories of jobs, including many of those which people dream of having, which they find deeply fulfilling, and which have long been avenues of upward social mobility.

With so many obvious and well-publicized downsides, it’s no surprise that most brief items about Artificial Intelligence tend to elicit a negative immediate response. Even the benefits of the technology are so much bound up with these difficulties that acceptance of it is more likely to be tempered with deep misgivings than fired by enthusiasm. So that makes the sans-serif ambiguity between small L and big i particularly unfortunate. Whoever Al is, if he’s going to create a permanent underclass unless he kills all of us first, and is already wrecking higher education and encouraging people to believe they need him in order to produce an intelligible paragraph, he’s the greatest villain in history. It’s like men who are known by three names. You may greatly admire John Quincy Adams, but you do have to remind yourself that when people refer to him that way they are not differentiating him from men called John Adams who did not go on murderous rampages.

So in fairness to men named Al, I often think of well-known men with that name who are unlikely to qualify for the title “greatest villain in history,” and to wonder when and if each Al might be due for a replacement by A.I. Here I limit myself to living Als, which cuts it way down since the name passed its peak of popularity quite some time ago. I’ve only chosen Als about whom I already have opinions. Also, I’ve left out athletes named Al, since it doesn’t seem likely that there will ever be sports in which humans and machines are competitive with each other.

• Weird Al Yankovic- what he does is pretty great, though it does seem to be the sort of thing the developers of Artificial Intelligence are specifically trying to emulate. If they ever catch up to him, it will be a Deep Blue Moment. A more disorienting one than the original, since chess has always had a computational element that makes it impressive when humans can do it at all while making puns and setting them to existing music seems to be more in line with what the brain evolved to do.
• Al Pacino- he made a string of bad films when I was a teenager and was going to the movies regularly, so I’m biased against him. In those bad pictures he seemed to be doing an imitation of himself, so I guess it won’t be long before an A. I. Pacino can equal that version of Al Pacino. But of course he has also done a lot of great work, and for an actor that always means surprising an audience with new ways of responding to your scene partners. It will probably be a long time before Artificial Intelligence has that ability. Besides, he seems like a very nice guy.
• Al Franken- whatever you think of his politics or of the circumstances under which he was driven to resign his seat in the US Senate in 2018, there’s no doubt that for thirty years he was the guy Hollywood turned to when they couldn’t get Albert Brooks. I wonder if, when the controversies about Franken came up in 2017, Minnesota wished they’d tried harder to get Brooks to take the Senate seat, he might have been terrific. Anyway, Franken did a bit on Saturday Night Live late in 1979 in which he suggested that the “Me Decade” of the 1970s should be succeeded by “the Al Franken Decade” of the 1980s. Right through December 1989, my father and I could make each other laugh out loud by randomly asking each other “What would Al Franken think of that?” So I have a fondness for the guy. It’s true that in his years as a political humorist and as an elected official, Franken hewed closely enough to the Democratic Party line that even the computers in existence at that time could have replaced him without much loss. I have some sympathy for him on that point- I didn’t include any Als currently in public office because my own political views are almost as predictable as his. I cheer for the Democrats, especially the ones who are under 80 and anti-war, and boo the Republicans. And the “Al Franken Decade” bit was so funny that I will never choose A. I. Franken over Al Franken.
• Al Green- maybe not as nice a guy as Yankovic, Pacino, or Roker, but for many generations his records have been the one of the most common soundtracks that accompanied the production of future generations. Not only in the USA- a friend of mine who was in the military for many years talked about meeting people in Africa and Asia whose first excited question upon meeting an American was “Have you ever met Al Green?” Whatever the future may be for Artificial Intelligence in Gospel, the name of the genre would seem to rule out great prominence for it in Soul Music, so I think the day of A. I. Green is far from dawning.
• Al Roker- he’s a big part of many genres of American television that I don’t watch. It would probably be easy even now for Artificial Intelligence to generate an A. I. Roker who would be just as good at predicting the weather as he is, just as cheerful when reporting good news, just as jolly when others in the newsroom make jokes at his expense, and of speaking in just as somber a voice over images of himself walking with his head down next to people who have experienced of terrible misfortunes. A personalized version of him that puts the user in the place of those newsroom colleagues and survivors of tragedies would be a big hit.
• Al Gore- I’m always surprised he’s still alive. To be honest, when I tried to listen to his speeches I was surprised he was ever a living being, he seemed to be a Disney Audio-Animatronics figure. It might be difficult for them now to come up with an A. I. Gore that is as primitive as the living Al Gore was in his prime.
• Al Sharpton- when he first came to prominence in the Tawana Brawley matter in November 1987, Al Sharpton was so strikingly similar to the character the Reverend Bacon in Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities that ever since people have assumed Wolfe was satirizing him. But the book was published in October of that year. Unless Wolfe was a clairvoyant, the resemblance between the Rev’d Mr S and his fictional counterpart must have been the result of conscious imitation on his part. Since Bacon was a brutal parody of a scam artist exploiting the later phases of the civil rights movement, it would not have occurred to many people to adopt him as a model. But that is very much the sort of choice Artificial Intelligence models make with surprising regularity, so I think A. I. Sharpton may be right around the corner.