The Future Has Already Arrived
The future is now old man. Or woman. Or them. But the future is now! The Fourth Industrial Revolution is in full swing, and despite the risks of leaping into tomorrow’s world prematurely, the cat has already been let out of its bag.
Regenerative large language learning models are just the start, and we have a lot more to look forward to. Every day, news of technological and digital “advancements” and innovations grace headlines, as glimpses of AI’s infiltration into every facet of our society and individual lives emerges.
When Governments Watch Back
In 2014, China publicly announced their outline for the construction of a social credit system using data and AI to construct a moral ranking system that monitors the behaviour of its citizens and ranks them based on their “social credit.” The Chinese government aims to reinforce the idea that “keeping trust is glorious and breaking trust is disgraceful”, punishing individuals with throttled internet speeds, banning access to flights, and even barring one’s children from enrolling in higher education if the Communist Party deems them untrustworthy.
1984 Orwellian comparisons are not exclusive to the totalitarian Far-East, but alive in the apparent democratised West as well. Following recent riots in France, the French parliament passed laws granting police the authority to remotely activate cameras, microphones, and GPS systems on phones, laptops, and cars of its citizens and residents. The government systems make use of facial recognition, geo-tracking, and social media data, scraping variables to create risk profiles for anyone in the public, and confirmed for use at the 2024 Olympics in Paris.
The War Machine Gets an Upgrade
As usual, the industry at the forefront of technological advancement, and making the most gains, is the war industry. Huge amounts of data from satellite and drone imagery can now be evaluated in seconds, and strategy options assessed with pinpoint accuracy to minimise the risk of casualties for ‘us,’ and maximise death and destruction for ‘them.’
The conflict in Ukraine may be driving AI innovation for the American military industrial complex in their second proxy war with Russia, but war wouldn’t be war without the reigning champions in the Middle-East, Israel.
Israel has already been using AI systems to plan deadly military operations for drone swarms in Syria and Lebanon and even ‘Sapiens’ author, Yuval Noah Harari fears that Israeli democracy is currently fighting for its life in the wake of Netenyahu’s government taking aims to neutralise their Supreme Court.
The idea and responsibility of democracy is either being exposed as a farce, or too ideological for practical application, revealing the more common ideologies of greed, money and power sitting behind the war machines, and now empowered by high-tech capabilities.
The Body, the Brain, and the State
Next on the card may be our right of autonomy. As WEF founder, Klaus Schwab wrote in his book titled ‘The Fourth Industrial Revolution,’ “as capabilities in this area improve, the temptation for law enforcement agencies and courts to use techniques to determine the likelihood of criminal activity, assess guilt or even possibly retrieve memories directly from people’s brains will increase… Even crossing a national border might one day involve a detailed brain scan to assess an individual’s security risk.”
Self-driving cars sound like a wonderful idea, until the doors lock without prompt and the car drives you to the police station for unpaid parking tickets, and with implanted brain-computer interface devices approved for human testing, such as Elon Musk’s Neurolink, so that one day you will be able to start your Tesla by blinking your eyes… twice… or by just initiating that thought.
The “enhancement” could also come with severe consequences for personal thoughts that are not approved by your government. Is our integration with technology stripping away individual rights, or are tin-foil hats required to the party? It’s a wild world, especially when our rights are restricted as consequences for non-compliance to mandated policies and laws.
Hubris and the Fall of Civilizations
The imminent “achievement” of technological ‘singularity,’ where the evolution of a self-learning, self-developing artificial intelligence surpasses the skill and intellectual capacity of the human-being, may actually save us from ourselves. But before we deal with Arnie’s “Terminators,” we would first need to deal with Orwell’s “1984.”
In the unabated quest of our advancement, we have become overly arrogant towards our survival. This is not the first rodeo for the human-being. Civilization of the Bronze Age, Ancient Egyptians, and Indus Valley humans all developed extensive civilizations, but were wiped off the planet, with reasons still unknown to our current society.
Is this the tale of the human-being? A continuous repetition of hubris hurtling towards our own demise. Are we happy to continue riding this wave towards Babylon? Replicating the sins of the father? Alas poor Yorick.
What Machines Will Never Be
With instant access to digital records, AI is smarter than you and all your friends, or anyone you know. The advent of AI has promulgated knowledge and democratised art. The future is now old man! ChatGPT is being appointed as the CEO of corporations, and AI robot butlers are on pre-order, eager to serve you cappuccinos. Commerce and industry have reached new heights (or low’s) and will continue to do so.
Perhaps now our addiction to creating processes, systems and automation can be quelled by the robots, and the humans can go back to being humans. Hollywood writers can go on strike over AI labour concerns, but research shows that AI is still more creative than 90% of humans. And yet still, we are far more advanced. With all of our tools, and technology, and fancy gadgets, the ability to be a human-being remains exclusive to the human-being.
AI may be able to write, but it doesn’t have the childhood trauma to understand the subtilities of sarcasm, and AI may be able to draw a beautiful picture like a real artist, but AI cannot move to Berlin and overdose like a real artist. The blessing, and the curse, is that we are the human-being. AI’s vast data is still the sloppy seconds of the lived human experience, and the intelligence of nature is far superior to anything artificial. Maybe just a few trillion more variables and you’ll be Gucci.
The Only Risk That Matters Is Us
If we are to overcome the self-inflicted challenges of technology, we would first need to overcome the intellect, and remember the nature that we exist as. At some point, we lost sight of the fact that to harm nature, is to harm ourselves, and we have allowed the avarice of misguided, unaware leaders to guide us towards corrals of illusion, distracted from the consciousness that we are.
The risk of AI is not AI, but the human, and the carnage left the wake of his ideological attachments. As much as we may assume our expertise and ability to use, misuse, guide or control the remarkable tools that we have created, we will continue to stumble towards our demise as long as the awareness remains external to the human experience. We are attempting to apply finite rules to infinite games, but the sky is big enough for anyone to fly, and the only option left on the table is to bring higher dimensions of consciousness into our awareness.
The Answer Was Always Within
Our salvation, as it always has, does not lie towards the external, but internal. We remain infinitely connected to nature, whether we are aware of it, or not, or acknowledge it, or not, and it is only in the stillness of our breath that we can remember who we are. No manipulation by our fellow man can tarnish that, and no AI can soar these skies.
If we can remind ourselves that whether this human experience is an illusion, a game, simulation, divine revelation, or all of the above, that the answer is still Love… if we can remember that as a human-being, nothing human can be foreign to us… and that we are not trying to save nature, but that we are nature trying to save ourselves – then perhaps we can step out of our own way, and AI can come along for our ride. Cappuccinos for the road?
