There’s something very wrong with the AI story that we are all being sold:
Nobody seems to have noticed that the script of man’s pathway to the pinnacle of human intelligence is about to come to its end, by handing our ability to think, over to machines.
As I write, I’m wondering if the name ‘Artificial Intelligence’ was a deliberate way to hide the truth in plain sight, all along.
Not because the technological breakthroughs that are coming at us thick and fast aren’t very clever.
But because just like the surrender of our value set to an artificial, valueless and damaging world dominated by money that manipulates everything about the way we think, we are about to give away our ability to even do that, to systems and technologies that cannot genuinely benefit any human being – other than those who own and run them.
In my eBook Actions Speak Louder than Digital Words, I talked about AI only having the ability to look back at history and the past. Even where back meant what had been published or ‘sensed’ by the Internet up to the very moment when the system was responding to a specific command.
This overlooked or deliberately whitewashed flaw of AI echoes one of the greater faults in the Human experience, where we inherently look backwards to our past experiences to provide guidance for the future.
This should be troubling enough.
But what wasn’t apparent even when I published that book in June 2023, was that as AI began filling everything across the web and digital sphere with its own responses, muses and anything else we can give AI-derived content as a name, it would then begin leveraging just as much and increasingly more of its own diluted content as a source, which is almost certain to increase as human input or creativity dries up.
And the contribution of human creativity and intelligence to the smorgasbord board of information and data that the AI engines feast on is most certainly drying up, as more and more of us surrender to the narrative we have been fed that tells us AI is now the only way, and jobs are threatened by the accompanying suggestion that AI can do things that we can never do!
Dictating our future by using the past as our point of reference certainly holds us back and creates all sorts of difficulties at all levels of life that we didn’t ever need to have.
However, the one thing that makes that experience manageable and, in some ways, arguably beneficial too, is that our human creativity and ability to look at every new situation and make sense of it and its context in ways that allow us to build bridges into the future, means that we are making progress all the time. Even if that progress is slower, whereas a machine that is limited only to reading what has already happened simply cannot.
People – and many of them too – genuinely accept the stories and myths that we have and are now being sold.
They believe and, in many cases, have become fearful that AI can already or very soon will take over every function that humans currently carry out within any business or organisation. Despite the reality that anyone using their common sense or daring to listen to their inner voice will recognise a very big question, ‘Where in this future does that leave any need for me?’
AI is very fast at what it does and is able to look at potentially all the information that is available to us in digital form at the very moment in time that a question is asked or an instruction is given.
That – and only that – is the real magic of AI.
It is the reason that we are all just accepting the idea that AI is already infinitely cleverer than Humans could ever be. Just as those who benefit from us believing this to be true intend us to believe.
However, our acceptance that we no longer need to be creative or think for ourselves, means that we will not only increasingly become dependent upon a pool of ‘knowledge’ outside of ourselves – albeit a very large one of everything that has been recorded, spoken, considered and then committed to the internet and digital platforms up to some point in history before. But this pool of knowledge that we will use for everything will become increasingly diluted by the growing amount of poor and corrupt information, data and ‘understanding’ that our already burgeoning use of AI with everything is now spaffing out into the digital ether.
As you read, Humanity is literally giving up the ability to think and create for itself, to a machine-driven world that is incapable of doing any more.
What is more, Humanity is surrendering these cornerstone abilities for survival voluntarily. Because someone who benefits from us believing we are inadequate without technology has told us this, when a change of the kind that overreliance on AI could be about to usher in would have needed something akin to an extinction-level event to take place at any time in world history before.
This uncomfortable truth will not stop those who stand to benefit from the AI takeover from pushing and promoting this path. They will continue peddling the myths that the AI takeover will be in our best interests and will be inevitable all the same. When it is nothing of the sort.
The Technology we have available to us today will not live up to its greatest potential. Because the greatest potential any technology that man invents will have, is to help improve the lives and experiences of all men, rather than to replace any one of them.
We know this to be true, as this has regrettably been the way that technological advancements have always impacted Humanity since the ending of the Agricultural Age.
Technology has always been employed to make money for those who own and control it since then.
The rise of new technology has always been at the cost of all others at some level. No matter who they are or what their connections might be.
The reality we face is that it may already be too late to save the world we recognise from a fate that we have all unwittingly chosen. Rather than there being any kind of event or catastrophe at the heart of future change that no one person could have been responsible for.
However, if we are to address the slide towards universal ignorance, with the accompanying potential to take us back into the dark ages once more, we must reassess, reimagine and regulate the uses of every kind of technology. So that technology’s master can only be the public good. Rather than profit and the disaster that is following hard in its footsteps right now.
If we value the Human experience and wish to improve it, it is time to learn, share and then live the truth that there is no need for any technology to replace jobs, other than so just a few can increase their profits and control.
The best way for everyone and everything to live well, is without the complications and diversions that misappropriated technology imposes upon us, and the technology we do embrace should always be used for the greater good and for the benefit of everyone involved.
Adam Tugwell 