AI stands for Artificial Intelligence but it also stands for Artificial Insemination. Are they independent concepts or intertwined in the world going forward?
Undoubtedly AI is going to revolutionise the human experience. But, is it going to be worse than the car which quickly made farriers, livery stables, poop picker uppers and the like redundant. What about the desktop computer which overnight forced the typing pool to either return to homemaking or to rapidly upskill themselves. An interesting feature will be that while all previous technological changes from the industrial revolution onwards badly affected the working class, this will affect the middle class.
But the worst effect will be on the body of ‘truth’ that underpins the human experience. Up to now, hard truths, like science and history, are directly relatable to some physical artefact. However, AI seems to generate new hard ‘truths’ as well as push new soft ones.
The problem that once a ‘truth’ has been generated it’s out there in the digital universe forever and cannot be removed. When researching a topic, AI will incorporate its other, possibly falsely generated, AI truths in conclusions going forward. This is technically called positive feedback which is not the “Well done Janet,” you receive from the teacher for a good answer. In the real world of cause and effect it’s a bad thing. Like the microphone that picks up the sound from a loudspeaker and feeds the louder sound back into the amplifier to make it even louder and so on until it’s an ear-splitting screech within milliseconds. The AI generated ‘truth’ ends up feeding off its own reality and thereby true reality gets debased. Sure, we can try to check its veracity but it can generate outputs far faster than we can debunk them and this doesn’t even take into account bad actors or countries that wilfully distort reality. Musk’s Grok was a recent example when it went off piste and seemed to incorporate Hitler and the Nazis into any answer it generated. Musk blithely stated that they would just tweak the algorithm not to. Huh! Apart from worrying why it did it in the first place, it highlighted how just altering a few parameters can alter how AI sees the world which will eventually end up being how we see the world. Or what about a bunch of legal cases in America in the past year where filings by lawyers using AI included references to non-existent cases!
Decades ago when robots were becoming commonplace, we were not worried that they could take over. After all, we joked, their attention span is only as long as their power cords. With the advent of the all-pervasive internet, that is no longer true. AI will become embedded everywhere.
The reality of the world is that it’s going to be owned by the algorithm and not humans and it will debase it. And so, we come back to what AI means. I believe AI will end up artificially inseminating humans with its version of reality and end up overpowering humans. Moreover, when combined with direct links from the brain to the digital world via things like Musk’s Neuralink, the future is truly frightening for mere mortals. The film, The Matrix, was a dystopian but reasonably accurate presentation of what brave new world awaits us. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
When I started this piece, I wondered what a Grok, Musk’s AI program, would look like. For a bit of fun, I asked ChatGPT what it thought. In a flash it came back with a comprehensive and fluent description. I was shaken as I had asked it to conceptualize something that didn’t exist and it did so without breaking a sweat or batting an AI-lid. I decided to anthropomorphize a Pac-Man but chose a green colour without any reason other than human gut feeling (and I’m proud of that undefinable concept). The dots represent anything that has been digitised by humans, be it data, images, science, history, creative stuff, thoughts, etc, and the product of AI itself in the future which will eventually overwhelm human input. The ghosts represent whatever you wish them to be.