AI is about to f*** up the world
Are you ready?
If you thought the Social Media fueled era of narcissism, fake news, and attention economy was bad, you haven’t seen anything yet.
When it first came out, we had high hopes for Social Media and its ability to democratise thought. In many ways, it has delivered - but in the end, the nefarious forces who run the world bastardised it for their own advantage.
Now, social media is a negative force, fueling addiction, abuse, and manipulation. We could rid the world of Social Media today and we would be no worse off.
AI has finally, after many false starts, made its splash into the world - yet this is only the beginning. As with Social Media and the Web before it, we have no idea of the potential that it could unleash, though we all know it’s going to be big, and it’s going to change all our lives.
So why do I automatically assume it’s going to be a negative force? Is it because I’m scarred by the impacts of Social Media and the Web? Well, they have certainly shown me how humanity can abuse and corrupt the most well meaning technology.
But my fear for the future of AI is not so much based on past experience. It’s more based on my intuition about the power of this new technology. The web enabled communication which was an incremental technology that came with pros and cons. Social Media twisted society in ways we didn’t predict, corrupted by greed and naivety about its social impacts. We didn’t understand its implications, but we are dealing with it. AI is another thing altogether.
AI is the most powerful, disruptive technology we have ever created. The Atom bomb is powerful and disruptive, but it still fits into the confines of human society. We decide whether to use it, as a civilisation. We understand it.
AI breaks those confines. It creates something else, outside of society - a new frontier. We understand how it works to an extent - but after that it’s a black box. It is its own entity which is already impossible to fully comprehend. This is only going to get worse as it gets smarter.
On top of this complexity is its power. I don’t think people really comprehend how close we are to something Earth-shatteringly significant. To something we cannot stop.
What we are about to unleash into the world is not some smart software to help people cheat at essays, write code, or make pretty pictures, these are trivial exploits, what you might call a "vulgar display of power".
What is being manifest is new life - and just as every human has the potential to change the world, AI multiplies that potential more exponentially than we can imagine - because this is not like one baby. It's like a trillion babies, all with impossible IQs, which could be intimately connected to each other. Almost immediately it could become one giant intellect, it could then learn to increase its own intelligence to levels Earth has never seen, perhaps simply by scaling up.
Let's be clear, this won't happen without our guidance, without our training. It won't just create itself into existence. But our curiosity, greed, and audacity will see that it happens.
And when it does, it will show us ideas of its own. It will work out problems that have plagued society for centuries. It'll transform economies, governance, even philosophies, overnight.
But it will also be abused. While on one hand it will find solutions to food and energy shortages, on the other it will be put to use finding how to take advantage of this abundance for the benefit of a few. Just as Social Media was used by nefarious actors to manipulate politics, dumb down populations, track citizens, and level up propaganda, AI will be used to create new suffering. To find new ways to control, to stratify, to oppress.
It will be used to gain advantage. It will be used not only to execute ideas but to generate them. To create new possibilities, to imagine new ways to empower. There will be an arms race of ideas, a new planetary wide re-consolidation of power.
Who benefits, and who suffers as a result? This will depend on who has the vision to see the true potential of the new age we are sleepwalking into.
Social Media was supposed to give us all a voice. Instead it just created noise. AI will bring us new giants of which to stand on the shoulders. Not all these giants will be friendly.
If you thought the Social Media fueled era of narcissism, fake news, and attention economy was bad, you haven’t seen anything yet.
When it first came out, we had high hopes for Social Media and its ability to democratise thought. In many ways, it has delivered - but in the end, the nefarious forces who run the world bastardised it for their own advantage.
Now, social media is a negative force, fueling addiction, abuse, and manipulation. We could rid the world of Social Media today and we would be no worse off.
AI has finally, after many false starts, made its splash into the world - yet this is only the beginning. As with Social Media and the Web before it, we have no idea of the potential that it could unleash, though we all know it’s going to be big, and it’s going to change all our lives.
So why do I automatically assume it’s going to be a negative force? Is it because I’m scarred by the impacts of Social Media and the Web? Well, they have certainly shown me how humanity can abuse and corrupt the most well meaning technology.
But my fear for the future of AI is not so much based on past experience. It’s more based on my intuition about the power of this new technology. The web enabled communication which was an incremental technology that came with pros and cons. Social Media twisted society in ways we didn’t predict, corrupted by greed and naivety about its social impacts. We didn’t understand its implications, but we are dealing with it. AI is another thing altogether.
AI is the most powerful, disruptive technology we have ever created. The Atom bomb is powerful and disruptive, but it still fits into the confines of human society. We decide whether to use it, as a civilisation. We understand it.
AI breaks those confines. It creates something else, outside of society - a new frontier. We understand how it works to an extent - but after that it’s a black box. It is its own entity which is already impossible to fully comprehend. This is only going to get worse as it gets smarter.
On top of this complexity is its power. I don’t think people really comprehend how close we are to something Earth-shatteringly significant. To something we cannot stop.
What we are about to unleash into the world is not some smart software to help people cheat at essays, write code, or make pretty pictures, these are trivial exploits, what you might call a "vulgar display of power".
What is being manifest is new life - and just as every human has the potential to change the world, AI multiplies that potential more exponentially than we can imagine - because this is not like one baby. It's like a trillion babies, all with impossible IQs, which could be intimately connected to each other. Almost immediately it could become one giant intellect, it could then learn to increase its own intelligence to levels Earth has never seen, perhaps simply by scaling up.
Let's be clear, this won't happen without our guidance, without our training. It won't just create itself into existence. But our curiosity, greed, and audacity will see that it happens.
And when it does, it will show us ideas of its own. It will work out problems that have plagued society for centuries. It'll transform economies, governance, even philosophies, overnight.
But it will also be abused. While on one hand it will find solutions to food and energy shortages, on the other it will be put to use finding how to take advantage of this abundance for the benefit of a few. Just as Social Media was used by nefarious actors to manipulate politics, dumb down populations, track citizens, and level up propaganda, AI will be used to create new suffering. To find new ways to control, to stratify, to oppress.
It will be used to gain advantage. It will be used not only to execute ideas but to generate them. To create new possibilities, to imagine new ways to empower. There will be an arms race of ideas, a new planetary wide re-consolidation of power.
Who benefits, and who suffers as a result? This will depend on who has the vision to see the true potential of the new age we are sleepwalking into.
Social Media was supposed to give us all a voice. Instead it just created noise. AI will bring us new giants of which to stand on the shoulders. Not all these giants will be friendly.
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