Thinking About AI

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Artificial Intelligence, the technology of our time.  The existential threat to our humanity that we don’t seek to avoid, rather rush headlong into with gleeful abandon.  After all, why think critically, when the answer is just a few keystrokes away?  

Now, I want to be clear at the start.  I’m not writing this as some sort of anti AI screed.  To ignore AI is to invite extinction of a different sort, but extinction all the same.  Look at history.  No empire was better off for having ignored the creation of the printing press.  No country is safer for having ignored nuclear technology.  No nation is better off for having tried to fend off the encroachment of the internet.  In the same way, to attempt to ignore or deny the rise of AI is to willfully dig your own grave.  So, what is to be done?

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Perhaps you’ve noticed a recent phenomenon that I have seen both first hand and anecdotally.  You ask someone a question or present someone with a problem and instead of offering what the answer COULD be, the listener immediately grabs their phone and asks chat GPT to tell them what the answer SHOULD be.  More often than not, the machine learning system creates a perfectly acceptable answer.  Problem solved right?  But at what cost?  In my opinion, the price for this ease of use is our agency, our originality, and our creativity.  But why does this matter if the solution to our original question is still found? It matters because of what it means in the long term.  When everyone is pulling from the same pool of answers, what happens to innovation? What happens to critical thought? What happens to freedom?

We believed that the internet would provide said freedom.  Help us to break away from the old media monoculture.  It would allow us to be ourselves, pursue our own interests, and surround ourselves with things we enjoy. Yet in our quest for comfortable individuality it would seem that we have created the very thing we thought to destroy.  The ONENESS.  The overwhelming void of over information.  The Hive Mind.  

What I fear is something I’ve termed The Great Flattening.  When everyone increasingly pulls from the same pool of pre formed answers we find ourselves being forged into an intellectual disc.  Smooth and perfect, the wrinkles of opinion and wrong answers erased through a deceptive process in which we think we are talking to one another, but in reality AI is speaking to AI with humans as the conduit.  Herein lies the insidious irony of the entire conundrum.  Machine learning is built off of the entirety of human knowledge and creation.  It only knows anything because at one time a human knew it.  Yet, if we continue to rely on AI for all the answers then there is no new information entering the hive mind and thus no new ideas.  The machine’s insatiable appetite continues to gobble up every scrap of originality until there is nothing left because why would we challenge ourselves to know more than the omniscient Machine? Why try to intuit what is already known? 

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There is no going back, but I would like to challenge us to remind ourselves that AI is a TOOL.  To be wielded in service of humanity not the other way around.   A tool not created to simply give us the answers, but rather a tool to provide us with the means to CREATE the answers.  So next time you find yourself posed with a problem, an email to write, an opinion to be shared, instead of immediately reaching for your phone, stop and think for yourself.  Challenge your mind, do not let it atrophy and stand up for your humanity.