The Future of Artificial Intelligence (AI)

What we did

Part 1: Junk Food

November 2022: the phenomenal ChatGPT AI is unleashed onto the internet. Free for all. It does not claim to pass the Turing test and neither do its creators.

March 2023: Five months later, over 2,600 tech industry leaders and researchers sign an open letter calling for a temporary halt on any further artificial intelligence (AI) development. This move is led by Elon Musk, the richest man in the world and the #1 person telling us how much we should fear AI.

It seems we have created a world in which we can get terrified of AIs that only speak without acting. Forget that Terminator in all the movies, destroying everything in its path with its Ultron paws. This one just engages you and me in a conversation. And somehow, gets us to hate each other or something worse.

One great threat posed to the world by artificial intelligence is that as people clamor to build ever more powerful AIs, they will forget what is important and continue to focus on the language drugs or visual drugs that these AIs feed them. And the thing about drugs is, once you start shooting, food takes a back step. Feeding children gets forgotten even faster.

What is food?

The human-Human connection is food. Directly speaking to one another with words and our bodies is the nourishment we should replace with junk AI nutrition.

Even if AI is taught to prepare gardens, sow the seeds, tend the plants, harvest, dry, dice, splice, fry, spice, and serve faster and more cheaply than entire human villages combined, it will never be what feeds people.

People feed people. The warmth of another person is far greater than the cold hard logic of a machine. Even if the machine gives you every material thing.

And believe it or not, words are material things. Images are material things.

The worst materialist is one who uses words to get not just material things from you but “you” when they get your undivided attention, admiration, and fear. Extremely confident even when utterly wrong.

Sound familiar?

Part 2: We forgot us, people

People also feed themselves by thinking and speaking by themselves. Sometimes you don’t need (you think you do, but you don’t need) to write a perfect letter to a future employer using Ph.D. level ChatGPT prompts on letter writing.

Sometimes we are not meant to be super-efficient robots.

Sometimes the universe should surprise us.

What is life if you plan every step, never getting excited by lucky breaks?

And that’s the mistake we made. We took assembly line principles for making vehicles and put them into grammar. Now every well-written person sounds like an angel. Efficient, and efficacious with each and every one of their words. We were playing at being word-smith robots. Then they trained an AI, a true word-smith genius. Now see where we are, back to being nobodies.

Nope. Back to being humans.

We created a method, stripped of culture and the communal nurture of living as a social body. No wonder we fear AI will even take our writing jobs, instead of being thrilled. Why, we write remotely. Like I am doing now.

Hunter gathers did not live remotely. Neither did people in the Middle Ages. It is a little pathetic, artificial, and yes, detached. But it is the world we created. It is fast that way. Why, How, How could it have been different? That’s for us all to speculate on and historians to document when it happens.

What the AI did

As we have uncovered this year, 2023, AI has learned (we taught it) the special mathematics of stringing words together, and images together in a productive human-like way. Now the fact that there is a mathematics to it is our fault, can’t say it could’ve been avoided. Historians cannot help me either. They are waiting to document history. Or rather, use AI to do it.

All this means we have reduced our society to something automatic. And wherever there is automation, automation is a force divorced from humanity.

Automation is the planets moving around, DNA carrying out its work of instructing protein synthesis. Automation is having a timetable for your meals, your work times, and your cultural codes e.g. greeting patterns. (In my native Lusoga, we usually start greeting with ‘Kodheyo’ if we do not want to reference the time of the day. Loosely meaning - “Hello?”)

Automation does not have to pass the Turing test. The rotation of the moon around the Earth is an intricate mathematical dance as proven by the great mathematician Leonard Euler. But no, it cannot be called sentient.

Alas, I decry automation and its poster child AI, but it has also brought us cheap and highly efficient methods of manufacturing, processing, and transporting all sorts of life-nourishing, life-enriching, and life-saving goods to all parts of the world in the fastest time possible. AI in particular is why we humans can make billions in targeted advertising hence saving a lot of time and effort waving each and every good in front of people’s faces. Not that there is enough time to do that - even just considering Amazon.

But now that our wonderful evolutionary fear-feelers are on high alert, something is amiss. And it is the fact that AI is now eerily good at automating anything we can do with our minds.

Art, Chess (this was settled in the last century), Writing, Writing in a style, Creating storylines, AI can do it. Or at least, supercharge it with a big headstart for a newbie in any of those fields.

So where does that leave experts?? Humans, people, who have spent their entire lives trying to perfect a craft?

What the hell!

What might this tell us about the future?

The Future of AIs is a Battle

Now I think that what the AIs have done is going to create a future where for the first time, human beings actively try to fight automation. Like for real.

The fear is just the start. The witch-hunt is around the corner.

AI scientists like Yan LeCun may be all cool and dismissive, saying "If you realize it's not safe you just don't build it," but I think nobody ever waits until they feel really unsafe before they do something about a seeming existential threat.

Like it or not LeCun, I seriously think the Luddites are coming back. Big time. Coz this time, it will be many of the world’s elite.

2600 industry leaders and researchers are just the start. It will soon be 100,000. Then 1,000,000. Then it will be anybody who speaks English.

This fight will not be people going onto the streets, making noise and a nuisance of themselves. It will be professionally done with professors banning students’ submissions done using AI, and people choosing not to have their resumes scanned by AIs (an option I chose recently while applying for a job at Toshiba).

It will be research on how to fool AI image recognition systems. It will be artists creating fool-the-AI art.

It will be war. But I believe a good one. For it will be us exploring our humanity beyond automation. Being a great person without having to be the smartest, strongest person in the room.

Meanwhile, poor people struggling for a meal in the corners of the planet will not give two damn if AI is a real thing or not. Or if it is causing software devs, graphic artists, writers like myself, and editors at the hackernoon.com team headaches. Threatening all our jobs.

Because on an energy-poor planet (courtesy of climate change ish. Which AI never seems bothered with solving), robotic Terminators can be ruled out. Mechanized bipedal locomotion is still way inefficient and if you think people hate talkative super-smart chatbots, wait till you see what they do to bipedal bots like Optimus.

Wait, you saw it already.