How Excitement Over AI Reveals Cynicism Over Humanity
“…tech companies [are] trying to squeeze AI for all it’s worth before it even has a chance to prove itself. And possibly exhausting the public’s enthusiasm for the science of AI research in the process.”
by Sadiya Shiraj
I’m starting to become convinced that a lot of the societal ills of the 21st Century can be blamed on tech bros having read too many bad sci-fi novels. For the first two decades the nerds of the world had such a grand time “disrupting” all aspects of human life and making an Earth-shattering amount of money doing it that now, drunk on their god-like data-fuelled power, they are attempting to steer humanity towards their visions of utopia. Some ideal future where everyone in the world talks to each other through avatars on the Metaverse, in virtual 3D Zoom meetings on their Apple Visions Pros, with Google-powered ChatGPT assistants helping us answer emails and invisible algorithmic bosses assigning us our tasks for the day. A halcyon vision of the future where all human life, labour and the whole collective human spirit is put towards that one pure, all-consuming and eternal goal: maximum productivity.
It seems anyone and everyone with a couple billion dollars sitting in their credit account waiting for that next golden goose investment (that isn’t, say, affordable housing, healthcare, education etc — you know — things that might actually better humanity in the short and long term) has jumped on the AI bandwagon. Across the globe hundreds of billions of dollars have been earmarked for researching and developing AI technologies by companies and governments since the start of the decade. AI researchers, who just ten or so years ago were likely living the miserly and unsexy life of a pHD student at a university computer science department, are now on the boards of billion dollar tech companies and are multi-millionaire rockstars in the tech and business world, each with thousands of X followers and their own wikipedia page.
However, I wish I could say that all this newfound enthusiasm for computational theory and the philosophy of mind, which until recently was all that characterised AI research, is due to a pure and infectious hunger to explore the boundaries of human creativity, push the limits of human ingenuity and make better, easier, richer and fuller the lot of humankind. After all, at the centre of any mass social movement, however large, can be found an unwaveringly passionate collection of crazies who would have been called naive optimists until the very point their ideas catch on to the popular imagination, at which point they are called pioneers. But of course, once that does happen and the public at-large has been initiated into the passionate vision of the pioneers you will always have the opportunists, who see not just a chance to become a part of big and bold, but rather cynically, a way to cash-in on the hype.
That is what I see happening in the tech and business world with AI. I am not here wanting to sound like another AI hater, or even an alarmist. Those who are sounding the alarm about artificial intelligence approaching the brink of apocalyptic visions where artificial general intelligence and AI consciousness usurp dominion over the world in a Promethean move against their creators are actually quite charming in my opinion, not unlike my nephew who knows nothing about quantum field theory but is obsessed with comic book multiverse stories. Or those bearded men on the streets with signs warning of the end-times.
Being afraid of the possibility that AI might one day be capable of taking over the world reveals at least in part the belief that AI can actually do something new and useful. Which is undeniably the case. This week alone I read a story about AI being used in farms to pick out rotten produce and minimise waste; AI being used to map large amounts of data about human behaviour and represent them as fluid art; and most exciting of all AI being deployed in the detection of breast cancer 5 years before it develops. I’m not going to pretend like I know how any of it works but if that isn’t something worth being excited about I don’t know what is.
The thing that I have a problem with is that so many people, and specifically so many people that happen to be in leadership positions at million and billion dollar companies, seem to be most excited about AI not for its capabilities, say in the early detection of cancer, but for its ability to replace human artists, writers, musicians, designers, editors, translators, service agents, support workers, nurses, paralegals, assistants…hell even AI therapists are now a real thing! Not to mention the AI chatbot “friends” and even AI romantic partners.
We’ve seen this type of thing before. When the early and free internet was taken over by tech monopolies, when local journalism was eaten up by media conglomerates, when financiers seized upon the novelty of crypto and NFTs and turned it into a giant pyramid scheme. This time it’s tech companies trying to squeeze AI for all it’s worth before it even has a chance to prove itself. And possibly exhausting the public’s enthusiasm for the science of AI research in the process.
In a world where the only good news that seems to come out is out of company media releases, and the only promising science seems to reinforce existing market trends, it’s important to be at least a little bit weary. We all know that journalism and to a large extent academia is inextricably entangled with the forces of capitalism. So to have any hope of finding information to actually inspire you, you have to seek out the human element in the stories you read.
With AI, it’s got nothing to do with what the technology can or can’t do today or what the tech CEOs and the journalists that hang on their every word about what they say it will do soon. You have to look to the original pioneers, the data scientists and researchers who are still cooped up in the labs exploring the depths and limits of the technology, to see what they WANT to do with it.
It’s no surprise that when you do look there, like when I found those stories of AI being used to minimise waste and aid imagination and diagnose cancer, you find reasons to actually be hopeful and excited.
