Here’s what artificial intelligence (AI) can already do: let criminals clone your actual voice to call your loved ones and tell them you’ve been kidnapped; create deepfakes that take your face and put it on someone else’s body in a pornographic video; produce political ads that show highly realistic images of completely made up events; enable governments and bad actors to spy on you by using facial recognition and data analysis to track your movements to monitor your relationships, as well as reliably guess your political and religious views. And oh yeah, it will likely take your job at some point.
AI is just the latest development in a blindingly fast series of tech developments that have brought about radical changes to our societies. While all innovations bring good and bad, I would argue that what’s happened over the last 25 years has brought far more harm than benefit. If we really look at what’s going on in our society, it seems pretty clear that we have gone down the wrong path. Here are some dismal numbers that should be setting off alarm bells: The suicide rate increased 35 percent from 1999 to 2018. One in five people at any given time are suffering from a mental illness. More than 1/3 of the population suffers from severe loneliness (But don’t worry, AI is creating virtual girlfriends/boyfriends that will solve this problem, and all for only 60 bucks an hour.) Homelessness has exploded, with about 235,000 people experiencing homelessness each year in Canada. Drug overdose deaths have tripled over the last 20 years and now outnumber car accidents as a cause of death.
In his landmark book Bowling Alone (2000), Robert Putnam compiled a mountain of data that showed how people had become disconnected from friends, family and the public space - and Putnam’s findings were from well before the internet, smart phones, streaming and social media became ubiquitous. If we examine our own lives, we will see exactly what Putnam was getting at. How many close friends do you have that you see frequently? I’m betting it’s three or less. How many organizations/ leagues/clubs do you belong to that aren’t solely online? The average person used to be in five. How much time do you spend looking at screens every day? The average is 7 hours, with many adults spending 11-12 hours per day, and some even reaching 15-16 hours. We somehow think of all this as normal, but 5000 years of recorded human history tells us it is anything but normal.
Of course a lot of things are better. GPS helps me get where I’m going without driving around lost for two hours (men are genetically incapable of asking for directions). Planning and booking vacations across the globe is simple and cheaper than it ever was before. My elderly mother lives in another city and I can order her groceries in a matter of minutes and have them delivered to her the next morning. But that’s the thing; most of the technology revolves around making things more convenient and easier. Why go out when you can order in? Why go to the movies when you can watch Netflix? Why have discussions and debates when you can just tweet out insults? Why spend hours reading books when you can read a blog written by some guy who thinks he knows everything? But easier is not necessarily better, not even close. The main thing this relentless quest for ease and convenience has done is allow people to have much less face-to-face interaction with other people. This lower level of human contact has lessened the level of trust in our society. And without trust, chaos is just around the corner.
Technology is also the main cause of our economic and political dysfunction. There are about 2.25 million industrial robots in use around the world and that number will grow exponentially over the coming years. Every robot displaces 1.6 manufacturing jobs, meaning that by 2030, it’s likely more than 20 million manufacturing jobs will be lost. But it goes way beyond making stuff; there are almost no fields that won’t be impacted by AI. The World Economic Forum wrote a report in 2020 that predicted that 85 million jobs would be lost worldwide by 2025 and a more recent study by Goldman Sachs estimated that two-thirds of all jobs were at risk of automation, including a lot of highly skilled knowledge work. The Chat GPT program can already do up all the paperwork for a lawsuit, build a website from just a hand drawn sketch, and read MRIs and CT scans. Its capability will likely grow quickly from here on out.
The political fallout from this has already been seen. Technology has made the problem of disinformation and propaganda even harder to combat. We saw during Covid how quickly garbage circulated around the internet and poisoned the minds of susceptible people. AI makes this even worse because it allows more realistic-looking fake news, including deepfake videos that are hard to identify. Chatbots are already responsible for tons of disinformation on Facebook and Twitter; AI will multiply these bots and make them seem more like actual people. Add to this ocean of bullshit the realization that the job losses AI causes will further destabilize our democracies. Mass unemployment, falling wages and wide-spread economic anxiety are always going to cause political chaos. When you sum all of this up, it’s a truly frightening picture.
The optimists point out that technology has displaced millions of workers before and that other jobs were created and so we needn’t worry about the robot future, They usually point to the Industrial Revolution as an example. Unfortunately, this blithe optimism misses a couple of important points. First, the Industrial Revolution took almost a hundred years to fully come to fruition. AI is coming at us much more quickly, with job losses already happening right now. The second point - naturally overlooked and forgotten by a society that ignores its own history - is that the Industrial Revolution directly and indirectly caused an incredible amount of misery, hardship, death and destruction. A post-mortem reveals a litany of calamities: virtual slavery for hundreds of millions of people; colonialism and the subjugation of more than two billion human beings; communism and all its resultant bloodshed and tyranny; incalculable environmental destruction; and not one, but two world wars, one of which ended with genocide and nuclear holocaust. So yeah, not a smooth transition.
Some of the more ‘enlightened’ tech leaders claim that a Universal Basic Income will be the answer. The logic is that AI, when combined with renewable energy, will drive marginal costs of almost everything to zero, and that the huge profits generated by this will then be shared amongst all of us. But will the owners of capital really be willing to fund a massive welfare program? If you’ve been paying attention, you’d know that guys like Musk aren’t real eager to share. We are now supposed to believe that a system in which two men have more wealth than 40 percent of the US population combined -about 135 million people - is going to suddenly become altruistic. Even if the plutocrats agree to fund it, is putting everyone on the dole really a solution? For many people, work is a source of esteem and satisfaction. Now let’s tell a 20-year-old: Sorry, you won’t ever have a job, but don’t worry we’ll pay you a subsistence wage for the rest of your life. (I’m pretty sure if we get a UBI, it won’t be enough to sustain the lifestyle most people would want.) I suspect some will love the UBI, but most will grow bored, angry and depressed.
Maybe you think I’m exaggerating and that somehow it will all work out. One of the leading AI companies is Google (Alphabet), and so you’d think they would know a little about this. Well, here is the former CEO of Google calling AI an existential threat and that it might get many people killed. Hard to be sanguine reading his words, isn't it? I’m reminded of some of the smokers I’ve known, who laughed off the warnings about cigarettes for years until one day they got sick and decided right then to quit. Why didn't they do it sooner? Arrogance, complacency, a lack of will. That's the problem with humans, we only seem to learn one way, the hard way. But it doesn't have to be like that. Nothing about this is inevitable or magical. We need to push back against the people forcing this technology on us, who think that the solution to all of humanity's problems is found in a microchip. We need to create a society that embraces our humanity instead of seeking to replace it.
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