LIVING IN A POST-AI SOCIETY

This post was made by me, a human being, from earth, without any use of AI. Enjoy ッ

What is AI?

In this post I want to explore some of my personal thoughts on the impact of Artificial Intelligence on society. Before we dive into it, let’s talk about what I define as AI. To me, AI is a term used for (1) a technology (2) trained to perform a set of specific tasks or instructions (3) on its own (4) without the need for human intervention.

I could talk hours about the exact meaning of AI, or about how AI has existed for over 70 years, but let’s not get into that right now.

What If...

Recently I came across an interesting though experiment that became the basis for this post. It goes as follows.

Let’s say you went back 500 years back in time. You would be in a world where the idea of going to the gym is absurd. People already had more than enough physical exercises by just going about their daily life. They didn’t need to go to the gym because they were already living an active lifestyle.

Now let’s fast forward to today. We are living in a society where lots of people don’t have the need to maintain an active lifestyle in order to perform their daily tasks.

Let’s look at the future. What if in, let’s say 100 years, Artificial Intelligence has been so baked into our society, that thinking for yourself becomes silly. That is what I fear for right now. Because it’s something that I am already experiencing right now. When I am starting a new project, one of the first things I do is ask some chatbot wether what I think is a good idea, or if I missed anything. AI is making me more and more dependent on external validation. Just like social media already has been doing.

The Issues

Lets focus on some of the issues I personally see with AI. The first one is already pretty clear I think; we are becoming overdependent on the external validation of a tool. This also means that rather than asking someone you know and being more dependent on eachother, we use this tool as a replacement for human connection and knowledge. I find this sad.

Another issue that is being talked about is something I would call Creative Authorship. As most of us know, AI has to be trained on lots of data. Generally speaking more data means better results. Although that is not completely true when talking about the whole internet. Training on a highly curated set of data will most propably result in improved results. Training on the whole internet cough Google cough is most of the time a pretty bad idea as a big part of the internet has been flooded with non-human content. Interestingly I have seen that lots of AI labs have started creating(/generating) their own content to train AI with to improve alignment.

Lets get back to the issue of Creative Authorship. I think that we as a society always have wanted to share about our experiences and lifes. Wether it be through music, writing, painting, dancing, technology, or any form of art. notice how I put technology as a form of art ;) With the rise of the internet people started to notice that it is the perfect place to share this art with everyone who has access to it, making this art accesible to almost everyone! I think that this in itself is great. Although now an issue arises. When you share something, who has ownership of this? Is it the creator of the artform, the platform that you share it on, or maybe the internet itself? Sharing something on the internet has become something very mundane for most people, but still when you read the small letters of platforms like Instagram, Pinterest, Google Photos, ... you might start to see a pattern: you don’t own anything. The platform does. Let’s not even get into the whole concept of the internet breaking with countries like China creating a literal firewall to close off their internet, making the internet as a whole not open anymore, and other countries starting to follow. So now these platforms own all of the content you post on it. And because of the rise of AI, these platforms have gotten the ideal use for this data. Use it to train AI and give users more of the content (albeit generated) that they themselves have liked. This increases engagement with the platform, which means more chances to advertise, which means an increased revenue and happy shareholders.

Their are way more issues with AI, like the use of insane amounts of power, and the effect it has on nature, or the need for big datacenters that could be used for things like medical research now being used to create the latest trending brainrot video. Or the fact that even now Nvidia has a monopoly on the Intellectual Property that make up the designing of these datacenters, which makes competing with them almost impossible.

The Goal

You might be asking “Wow, zias, this is all very negative, do we have any hope?”. Luckily we do, firstly: please go read the Bible and go to a Church where they teach about the Bible and Jesus Christ.

Secondly I have been seeing lots of positive advancements too. I think that people will have to be more mindful in the way we use AI, and that eventually we will learn when to use it -and maybe more important- when not. I am seeing more and more people mindfully choosing to not use AI to solve hard issues, just because we feel like we need the challenge, we don’t want to support the business behind AI, or because we enjoy the fact that what we are doing, is not done with the use of AI, but rather creates opportunities for human connection and problemsolving together.

Not everything should be done fast and efficient. Doing something slowly and mindfully creates opportunities to learn, fall, and get back up. That might be the best way to actually learn. And maybe, just maybe, it might make you feel a little more authentic & human.