Preliminary Thoughts Towards Artificial Intelligence
I’ve never spoken about AI. Not on social media, not on here… I’ve barely spoken about it with friends. The world, on and off line, has been so noisy with its chatter that I couldn’t hear myself think. This is usually the case: my brain gets too stressed out by a billion voices repeating a billion a voices. Echo chamber implies a true source. It’s more like the clamorous echos of discourse are entirely synthetic, that they never had a starting point in the first place, like adding sound effects to room tone in digital editing software. I have to wait until the noise dies down so I can think clearly.
I’m struck by how much people’s reactions remind me about when Wikipedia first got popular, which I’m old enough to remember. Oh, people said, anyone can write anything. My reaction was always, You mean to tell me you believe everything you read in a book on the basis of it being a book? The fact that Wikipedia had footnotes will always destroy any arguments against it. This leads me to remember the time I heard a linguistics lecturer at uni read a Wikipedia article verbatim, holding the sheet closely to his chest, not mentioning its source. I knew it was a Wikipedia article because I had read it already. For many years after, it seemed everyone I knew, myself included, began with Wikipedia when learning about a subject. This is because we learnt how to use it. The argument here is predictable. AI is a tool we need to learn how to use, etc. But I also want to haunt you: You better come up with a less kneejerk reaction to AI because, within 10 years time, you’ll be using it.
The ecological arguments are out-and-out shadow projections. Well done, you’re killing the environment with your social media posts and child slave devices slower than Peter Thiel and Elon are. The target needs to be moved somewhere more productive. I’d make this same argument for the ways AI will change the job market. The problems are government and corporate management of the environment, AI and the job market. They’re the ones that need to handle this.
Everyone seems obsessed with intelligence, Terminator style, but I think the real interesting thing is artifice. This is a huge statement that reaches far outside the brevity of this post. I’m referring to the artifice of human relations (i.e. AI romances) and pop culture (AI artists, AI manipulated photos). I don’t like this at all. It concerns me more than anything else I can think of. But also what world did we think we were living in in the first place? Where do we draw the line between sincerity and cynicism, fiction and the material?
Don’t get me wrong, I’d rather live in a world in which AI doesn’t exists. I want to rub my face in grass, drunkenly collapse with friends, have a body, get dirty, wash myself and so on. I think I’m less defending AI and more criticising internet users burping out whatever minus 500 character discourse they read elsewhere. The future we see zooming towards us is the world we find ourselves in. We need to co-create it or it will be created for us.