In our generation we had never so much disruption as now.
We had 2020 which no need to describe further, before that we had several economical crises along with global warming and now we have AI. Whereas AI is not new, the exponential growth right now is insane, to the point every single company out there is trying to find ways to incorporate it as part of their business model as it will be a way to deliver even more money to the shareholders.
Have we stopped to think about what it means for our society? No, why would we?
Unlike the nuclear war threat which was controlled within the governments, AI is a private arms race. It’s all about acing the market and making money as fast as possible. Who controls our destiny in this case?
If you know all your competitors are all trying to understand how to use AI to accelerate their business models why wouldn’t you? Of course you will.
The future? Unemployment on the rise
The reality is a lot of us will lose our jobs in a near future, probably faster than we were thinking. From a company private stand point yes it makes sense. Is it ethical? That’s the debate.
All of us will try to scratch our heads to stay afloat on the tip of the iceberg for as long as we can, but the reality is the apples will start to fall without the eco-social infrastructure to support that change.
Are governments ready to support a huge number of unemployment along with the cost of climate disasters? Nop
What it means for our future
When I saw the news that Elon Musk warning about AI (article here) my first reaction was, we’ve lost control clearly, because one thing is for sure, Elon Musk doesn’t care about the impacts to society, so if even he is raising alarm bells it’s because we clearly don’t know what we are doing anymore. For all I know, we are probably all F*.
We have ignored global warming and we are ignoring what this means for us. Could AI be used to improve our lives? Yes it could, but again, it’s more a race to try to make as much money to the individual without thinking about the consequences.
The whole problem comes down to lack of accountability. Who is accountable for when things go wrong? The AI? The people that developed the AI? The company using AI? The ones trying to use AI to exploit us? You can’t even trace it to anyone, so no one is accountable. If no one is accountable, you can do whatever you want without consequences. The incentive to do wrong is huge!
Human connection is gone
If you can’t trust what you see on the screen, is the painting real or not? If someone else can use your voice to their own benefits and purposes, if the person you are speaking over the phone might not be your kid or your mum who can you trust? Even video calls can’t be trusted as using AI you can really become anyone you want. Without trust what have we left in the human connection?
Democracy is dead
Can you imagine Cambridge Analytica powered by AI? Yap, we are f# because I’m sure someone will
We are stupid
We are the only species that will kill each other and our world because we are selfish. It’s very easy to exploit our little stupid brains to someone’s purpose (whoever is using AI to their own benefits). Everyone knows whoever controls AI controls everyone else and the worst is, we are so glued to our phones seeing “cat videos” we won’t even realize we are being controlled. We have been already.
Can we do something?
At the end of the day, AI (at least for now) is a tool that can do anything we ask for it to do, so yes it could do our the world better but that would require the whole world to align and realize we need to think about what we are doing before we kill each other.
Is there any hope that we’ll actually do it? Very little but we are still at the point we can do something about it. Now would really be the time to trigger the emergency button and stop everyone and think through what we want our future to be before we no longer have a say on it.
Also would really help to educate people – but this assumes people want to be educated to understand what it means for them. We can’t look into a specific action or feature, we need to be able to look into at macro level and understand what it really means for our future.
If you want to educate yourself, here’s 2 podcasts to watch
Finally, how do you know this post was not written by Chat GPT? Well, probably because an AI would write a lot better than I do. Soon enough human written posts will be a thing in the past. In fact I would say they are already.
FYI, you're TBB 