AI Tags In, Humans Tap Out
We’re living in a strange limbo as AI exits geek circles to sweep the public consciousness and private marketplace of everyday normies. Ethics concerns and doomsday scenarios aside, do these things have staying power?
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Humans love imagining a future landscape — or hellscape, depending on one’s view — of robots taking over the world à la Terminator. Even so, we’ve already delegated many critical tasks to artificial intelligence, from regulatory paperwork to farm equipment to military combat. More nuanced applications, like simulating human connection, have proven challenging to meaningfully transform with AI.
But this status quo has a new challenger: ChatGPT, among the first entrants in a frenzy of chatbots capturing global users in the millions. Named after the “Generative Pre-trained Transformer” language model of its creator, Silicon Valley-based OpenAI, ChatGPT writes and retrieves information in response to text inputs. With conversational features, it’s more realistic than analogous technologies, and it beats intelligent assistants (like Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa) in the range of tasks it supports.
Setting aside the merits of the technology itself, our newfound society-wide obsession with its “nightmarish” implications is arguably the more compelling story. Consumer-facing ChatGPT and its ilk (Google’s Bard, Microsoft’s Bing AI, and other chatbots) seem silly in scale to the OG robots effectively running our world — digital incumbents busy in the background at any given time. It’s in the predictive algorithms across our financial system. It’s automating our food production and overseeing critical energy infrastructure. It’s the biometrics and cameras tracking much of China right now, while another model across the globe is likely simulating a cost-benefit analysis of implementing such surveillance interventions domestically. And it’s in our brains as we make sense of our highly tailored news feeds, governed by personalized algorithms.
In a new but predictable move, AI’s tendrils have reached culture. AI-generated music and art offer a similar productive utility but with greater social implications, leading us to rethink longstanding copyright protections.
We arrive at the uncanny limbo where approximations of human-made material are becoming harder to distinguish. Chatbots are ultimately an innocent player in this dynamic, trumped by more sensational media, such as “deep fakes” realistically depicting public figures — most recently, Russian President Vladimir Putin declaring martial law on Ukrainians in its territory.
At what point does the limbo graduate past absurdity, possibly entering the physical realm? And how will we respond? Will AI conform to our norms, constantly in a state of flux as humans advance? Does it have staying power?
That depends on what happens with us, the end-consumers. Leaving out the proverbial 1% of developers, investors, and regulators who actually oversee AI advancement, the future hinges on whether we, as consumers, tune in or drop out. The forecasted outcome is clouded by today’s competing socioeconomic pressures — all perfectly timed to disincentivize and distract from any real dissent and/or counter-innovation from the broader populace. More pressing matters demand attention here on the ground, with suicide rates reaching an all-time high, the quality of education plummeting, the lessons of the pandemic fading, global instability rising, and social division becoming entrenched. It’s an opportune moment for human displacement to speed up from an incremental transition to the new standard.
We’ve been teetering on a recession for over a year, and the long-awaited layoffs are finally materializing. The tech sector alone shed over 150,000 employees so far in 2023. Now’s the perfect time to exit employment, don our headsets and digital siloes, and interact with the same tools disrupting our work and personal lives as we doom-scroll to death.
Contents:
- ChatGPT’s shake-up
- Our dance with AI: Risks and regressions
- Questions of longevity
