Urgent Debates
The first collaboration of Digital Pilgrims with the Coderfull community brings forward a few questions: What discussions are we having about technology? Are we understanding Artificial Intelligence?
It has happened: we coexist now with artificial intelligence that works, makes art, writes and even codes other AIs. We are in need of some understanding, and we surely are trying. The statistics on AI proves that: the market is booming, jobs are multiplying, more papers are being published than are being read, and articles on this topic are flooding our screens. But what is it exactly that we’re talking about?
This is the first article of a series produced by Digital Pilgrims, a collective of study and reflection on technology and society. We were summoned by the Coderfull platform to bring and update our previous debates about society, tech, the future of work and the deep changes we are living today as humans of the 21st Century. Our articles are not meant to only be read, we write to start a conversation. Let’s start with our relationship with AI.
Quantity has never been an indicator of quality, even less so of usefulness and benefit. The amount of characters written doesn’t assure that we now have keen ideas about AI. And when it comes to these debates, we humans are a bit behind. In 2017, for example, when AlphaGo could already recreate itself and Google had artificial intelligences that could create others, half the people who had interacted with an AI hadn’t even noticed.
We think discussions about how technology works are restricted in at least two ways. First, some of these conversations take place in small circles and are labeled as technical, boring, geeky, or complicated. They are dismissed by many people as “discussions for people who are in the know.” This is one of the limits of debates on technology: it was already a problem for the Homebrew Computer Club in the 1960s. This is also partly connected with a dismissive view of transformative innovations. This happens with regards to the digital world, but it also occurred way back in the fourth century BC when writing appeared among the elites of Greece. Few people accept the new technology, even fewer express their opinions on it, and only a handful understand it. Sometimes, there even seems to be a paradoxical enjoyment in being one of the few, in the idea that something so fundamental for everyone’s lives only circulates among a few select individuals.
The other restriction that concerns us is thematic. As we said above, some discussions are taking place broadly, which is understandable given that we use technology constantly, but… what is it we’re saying? We see limitations on the superficiality of what we share. Why is the Twitter algorithm suggesting this to me? WhatsappWeb needs AI to schedule messages and auto responses. Is that really what we’re thinking about every time we give over larger and larger portions of our lives to machines without understanding how they work and interact? Is that what’s on our minds when we store our most treasured data on servers that are physically in Taiwan, Singapore, or Dallas? And when we talk to these machines… Do we ask the important questions?
We aren’t sharing our most complex ideas, and one of the reasons is that we can’t find a space of our own to discuss them. A space that isn’t boring, geeky, or just “for people in the know.” A space to say: hi, I’m also a cyborg, and I don’t really know what that means. And ask others: do you feel threatened by the AI that you work with, like me?
Maybe it isn’t really important to understand why these limitations exist. I do think it’s crucial, however, to recognize that we have to overcome them in order to recover our vital strength. It is no exaggeration to say that our survival today depends on our ability to redirect where our use of technology is headed. Setting aside demographic differences, we have to overcome the limits of information circulation, become “the people in the know,” and express critical viewpoints in these debates. If technology is consolidated work and creative power, it’s also the path towards the world we need.
Human beings are less and less exclusively organic, less and less restricted to our physical environment, and not anymore the only ones making the decisions. Yet we don’t fully understand what it is that’s extending us, what our bodies and societies are relying on in order to live and work.
This is why we believe that emergent debates (for example, the ones we’re encouraging from Digital Pilgrims) are urgent and necessary. We believe that many people are willing to participate in them; we just need to build and maintain spaces for doing so.
