Tag: AI

AI: A Prediction

I believe that the pervasion of artificial intelligence will eventually trigger extreme reactions from segments of the populace. Some will react to the impact of AI data centers on electricity costs and local ecologies. Others will be angered by the impact of AI on labor, not just the displacement of human workers, but the further deskilling of workers and their increased alienation from the process and product of their labor. Lastly, there will be some who will decry AI’s undermining of people’s connection to reality. That is, many people will find it increasingly difficult to distinguish between real photographs and AI-generated images, videos of actual human events and AI-generated fabrications, and the replacement of human relationships and connections with AI-based avatars. In fact, we already see these things occurring. These disaffected individuals and groups will posit that AI has occasioned a break of humanity from their social world, and will therefore conclude that AI’s societal impacts are intolerable.

I offer this to suggest that while much of the economy hinges on the success of artificial intelligence and while the so-called tech oligarchs increasingly bend the policy-making apparatus to their will, it is highly presumptive to believe that the ascent of AI will proceed absent any concerted human resistance. There will be resistance, some forms of which will be unpredictable. However, I think that it is highly plausible that many will consider AI to be a source of profound alienation, and thus an intolerable source of social and cultural malformation.

The future remains unwritten.

Fabrications of Consciousness

I saw Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning, Part One yesterday. In the film, AI is the antagonist. One of the primary threats discussed throughout is the ability for conflict and chaos to be created and sustained through the manipulation of information.

This is an apt film for the times in which we live where many people’s capacity to discern what is true and false, what is a fact or an opinion, what is credible or non-credible is virtually non-existent. Ideas have consequences and erroneous ideas can have grave ones. This is especially so as we hurtle towards a future where scientific and political literacy become ever more important in order to make sense of a rapidly changing world.

AI, Human Obsolescence, and Fascism

There was a report on Marketplace yesterday that included a statement from an executive at OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT. He said that AI will help companies to improve efficiency. He added that it will also cost jobs.

From a policy standpoint, how will governments address the sudden obsolescence of workers from industries so affected? You may recall that many workers who were displaced by deindustrialization and globalization never fully recovered, to say nothing of local and regional economies.

Also, and perhaps more urgently, in an age of increasing political polarization, where politicians present themselves as proto- and neo-fascists, does not such economic dislocation serve as fertile ground for insurrectionary sentiments? While these new technologies may represent a boon for corporations, they could also produce profound instability in society as a whole.