The AI mirror
Another day full of stories of doom and gloom for humankind by the artificial hand of artificial intelligence.
In March, the Future of Life Institute (catchy name!) issued an open letter to pause the development of AI with famous people signing it. A few weeks ago Yuval Noah Harari argued that AI had hacked the operating system of human civilisation. And last week Geoffrey Hinton, the Godfather of AI, quit Google to be able to freely speak about the dangers of AI. Reading these stories might make you want to crawl into bed and shiver in horror with every sound coming from the outside signaling your imminent demise.
This whole narrative is based on the usage of the term Artificial Intelligence and the anthropomorphization of technology. Promoted by Sci-Fi movies, (I, Robotor The Matrix comes to mind), one is led to believe that technology is awakening and it is only a matter of time before we all get enslaved. People idolize any technology associated with the term 'Intelligence'. Yet they are ready to quickly dismiss any technology which suddenly doesn't perform as expected. A good example is the class of products called smartphones, where people will call their device a dumb piece of shit when it can't perform even the basic function of calling some other person. They do this despite the fact that millions of smart people worked for years to build it.
The thing is that systems programmed and trained on data have been around for some time. Google with its search engine is the prime example of that. Just because it is not labeled AI, doesn't mean it is not one. At the same time, we've already been enslaved by technology and are blindly following every command issued to us. Think of the evil AI, masked by a soothing woman's voice, marketed under the acronym GPS (how many people really know what the letters stand for?). This voice is obeyed without question, while sending you to places you would never go on your own... or would you?
The term AI is now used as a product differentiator in the marketplace. Every mundane technology is now powered by AI and promises to revolutionize our lives and absolve us from meaningless tasks or even any decision making. A good example: 'Slack GPT could soon attend Huddles so you don’t have to'. That’s right, Slack, the wunderkind rescued by Salesforce from an onslaught from Microsoft. Slack, which didn’t introduce anything innovative in years, is hoping that users, by not being there for meetings, those users will get more value out of its product. The question of course is why there should be a meeting in the first place if no humans are actually planning on showing up.
Another example is the dating app Snack, which allows you to send an avatar on the first date in the virtual world to assess the potential mate. The thinking seems to be: why go on an actual date in the real world when you can safely, conveniently send the AI version of yourself? That seems to be the actual intent of the Snack app makers, defeating the purpose of… dating.
AI, nicely described to me as “high-speed statistics”, is just another kind of technology. It’s a tool. Because of the speed at which it can provide outputs faster than ever before, it creates this emotional sensation where we feel there is something magical behind the curtain. There isn't. This recurrent pattern can be traced in history with stories like the Golem or with R.U.R.
AI is only a mirror for humanity. If you don't like what you see, change it and stop blaming the mirror.