In review and in prospect
The trouble with tech people “predicting the future” is that they apply a linear lens to this dubious activity. The tech world is on overdrive nowadays hyping up “artificial intelligence” just because an app that generates strings of text that follow patterns gleaned from large language models has gone viral. These are the same cohorts that predicted we’d be living in plastic houses today, that a city buzzing with cars will be our future of choice, and that we’d all be commuting on rocket ships to space for work. More recently, back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the IT guys said the future would be online retail and their accountants promptly sold the idea of pumping billions in venture capital on “unicorns” like Pets.com and Webvan to gullible investors. Then they changed tack somewhere in the mid-2000s and suddenly we were welcomed into a world of “social media for social good” — a world where we’d be forging even stronger family and social ties and making more money on business models “enabled” by the “new” economy.
Not to be a triumphalist for our species and the wetware “minds” we possess that supposedly distinguish our kind from all the rest, but, in all those instances, we not only embraced, learnt to live with, and thrived under the technological landscapes that actually materialised (most of which were vastly different from the hype that preceded them), we managed to put these technologies in their proper place. Cars have now largely been dismissed as monstrosities that we need to rid our cities of. “Plastics” have become a dirty word — literally. Online retail had become big bad sweat shops. Social media is now going the way of cars — a social cancer that has brought out the worst rather than the best (as originally hyped) in people.
In all of these instances, people had decided, at some point in the evolution of these technologies, to take back their space and place. At the moment, the IT guys are convincing us that AI is coming to get us. Well, bring it on. At some point, just like how we opened our eyes to what the ones that came before it really are, AI and its hype will be found out. And we will take our space and place back from it. Those who would like to romanticise this tension between us and The Machines as some sort of “war” are actually on to something. Currently, for example, we are “at war” with social media as we try to protect our kids’ minds from its poison and deal with the political polarisation it is causing. It is still not clear if we will win that “war” collectively. At the moment victories are individual — disciplined individuals who have foresight making a choice to walk away from (or more consciously manage their exposure to) social media that is causing social bad. Lesser minds prefer the lazy path, allowing themselves to be subsumed into the technology and delegating the best faculties of their minds to its algorithms. We are also at “war” with cars and some individuals are opting out from this once-hyped possession to push for better public transport, use of bicycles, and extoling the benefits of walking.
Just as it takes well-raised people who posses minds that could distinguish the authentic from the fake, the posers from the real deals, and the cancerous from the life-enriching, winners in “wars” versus The Machines will likely go on to form a new social class. The new “masses” will be those who continue to allow themselves to be enslaved by technology and, in the case of digital technology, become mere parts of algorithms that do the “thinking” for them. We already see this in how the best (and usually most affluent) societies are making headway turning their cities back to bicycle- and pedestrian-friendly spaces and reducing their dependence on fossil fuels. Note that it is in these areas — cars and oil — where most of the rest of humanity had “lost” the “war”. A new elite of people who are winning that “war” is emerging. The poor, as usual, will be left behind. Same thing is likely to happen in the new “war” against AI. The haves will win, the poor will lose. The “haves” in this case does not necessarily refer only to people with financial resources but, more specific to this case, people who have the sound minds and intellectual skills to prevail.
Last week’s blog posts
March 19, 2023 Ramon Ortoll
"Bottomline: those in the opposition can dish it out but when faced with a formidable foe, they can’t take it, which is why even with the advent of artificial intelligence, the Opposition will continue to remain as dumb as a doornail."