You may need to stop and think about the next paragraph. It is certainly recommended that you take the time to do so. If you can.
We don’t get addicted to the things that we need.
Your brain may now be whirring and coming up with all the things you have, you use or that you experience in your own life that you just know people can get addicted to in some way.
But are any of them things that anyone genuinely needs?
The honest, fully understood or recognised answer will be NO.
The things that we need are the very basic things that allow us to survive in a happy, healthy, safe and secure way – and NO MORE!
We do not need AI to survive or to thrive.
AI is something that somebody somewhere else is working very hard to make us want.
We are probably all guilty of taking for granted the idea that progress is a life process that can and only ever go one way.
Yet progress isn’t directional.
The real meaning of progress is a pathway or journey towards an outcome where our experiences of life will have been improved.
Better isn’t always achieved by adapting to or adopting tools, methods or experiences that we haven’t used before.
A significant trap for the unwary exists where change has not worked out as well as hoped.
Instead of going back to what was proven to work before, we step forward again, armed with the foolish belief that moving forward or progress is the only way a bad situation can be improved.
Change for change’s sake doesn’t help anyone, other than those who believe they have something to gain.
Whichever direction you look or listen, information and chat about AI is coming at us all, thick and fast.
But why the hurry? Why are we already being made to feel that AI is a ‘done deal’ and it’s something that we MUST now have?
As with most things in an age where messages and narratives are packaged to look like they are everything and that no other truth could exist, the truths that sit behind AI and much of the new technology that is being installed at various points along the journey that we call our daily lives, are genuinely frightening if and when they are obvious.
The problem for us, is they are being cleverly concealed from us and are hidden in plain sight.
The speed of the arrival of ‘Chat Bots’ and the generation of technology that accompanies it is no accident.
These forms of AI are being pushed at us deliberately fast, with the intention that the majority of us will simply miss the trick.
The trick we are intended to miss is the understanding of what AI is already doing and what the arrival and rollout of this latest generation of Artificial Intelligence is really all about.
If enough of us miss it – which there is a regrettably serious risk that we are likely to do, the reality we face is that it will simply be too late for People to do anything about what amounts to an engineered tech-takeover, once we are already dependent upon it and all of the tools we have available to us to maintain our independence and freedom of choice today, have either been made redundant or deliberately destroyed.
AI is not something that is happening somewhere else. It is happening to us.
No matter how uncomfortable the truths are that accompany AI’s lightening quick arrival, we have a responsibility to wake up to the truth and then act upon that knowledge, using every opportunity that we can own.
The biggest mistake that any of us is likely to make, is to believe it already a foregone conclusion that AI will play the part in life that it’s going to play, whether we like it or not.
It is essential that anyone who can see the dangers of adopting all the forms of AI that are being fire hosed at us, understand that the disadvantages of accepting its use disproportionately outweigh the advantages of doing so.
The so-called advantages of AI will only come to those who own, control or have the ability to make money from everyone else becoming enslaved by it.
Over the course of the following pages, we will go on a brief journey through the realities of AI and what they mean for life as we know it, as they are today.
These are the specific issues that you should really be thinking about. They are the things that you should be researching, considering and talking about with everyone who is important to you.
The most frightening aspect of the days and months that lie ahead, is that the building blocks of an unstoppable change – that has the power to affect us all, are being assembled around us in a way that would be best described as taking place whilst the majority of us are fast asleep.
Fast asleep, because so few of us are even questioning the legitimacy and need for what is happening, with the majority falling back on their knee jerk reaction to fear.
Each of us holds the power to stop the AI revolution that is now under way. The journey begins with learning to stop, ask the questions and then keep on asking the questions ‘Why? and What?’
Why is AI necessary?
Why can’t we just improve the systems we’ve already got?
Why is the change happening so quickly?
What is the real benefit of AI?
What is the real cost of AI?
What is AI replacing?
What will be lost?
Yet that is really just the beginning.
Within a period of what might only be weeks or months, we will need to forget relying on the provenance of all the data an internet search provides, that we watch on video, or that we listen to.
We will not be able to trust any information source that isn’t itself assuredly genuine or original. Because the chances are that whatever we are otherwise being presented with, it will have been at least influenced by, or be a complete AI creation.
AI will only create and present information or work, based upon the parameters or the algorithms that it has been set.
As the programmers already know, the credibility of the AI ‘end product’ is far from being guaranteed – even though the way it is presented will convince many of us that it is.
Adam Tugwell 