Midnight Musings

This text reflects upon the use – and risk of misuse! – of a powerful new tool at humanity’s disposal. It is not anti-AI, it is anti-laziness.

The rise of artificial intelligence is often portrayed in popular media as some great, terrible, apocalyptic event that causes casualties in the millions if not billions. Terminator and the Matrix franchises are two noteworthy examples, but there are others. Battlestar Galactica’s very premise was humanity struggling to survive a genocidal onslaught by its own robotic creations. Yet people’s fixation with AI to automate, streamline and make more efficient everyday tasks is telling. People worry about AI becoming sentient, when they should worry about becoming insentient themselves.

Consider. What used to take people hours, days, even weeks and possibly even months, to gather information, compile and format it, and then present it into a coherent format can be done in a few seconds or minutes with a few keyboard strokes. This will in itself eliminate countless jobs. Society marches on, and technology has always strived to make our lives more efficient, like the chainsaw versus the axe. Technology itself has eliminated all manner of jobs, and made others safer. Those that may have had positions of employment eliminated in days of old usually had the opportunity to undergo skills retraining to keep them employable and valuable. Time and technology march ever onwards, and standing in the way of that rarely works. But there is still a fine line that should not be crossed.

Modern industries’ flirtation with artificial intelligence is reaching ever higher proportions – potentially dangerously so. As stated before, what used to take days and weeks now takes seconds. Reports and documentations can be conjured out of the aether, formatted any which way one chooses, and presented as fact. AI can also be used to take all that information and summarize it, reorder it, even recompile it. Before you know it, AI is generating reports, summarizing it, and then it’s being incorporated into policy or enshrined in law.

A meme asked what problem AI was trying to solve. Some clever wit responded with “paychecks.” See where this is going? The technology may be imperfect, with many examples of its flaws, but its output is oftentimes only as good as its input. And there’s a real concern over people and corporations using AI to justify bad decisions they already want to make. Here’s the thing: a machine cannot be held accountable. Therefore a machine cannot make a management decision.

The real risk is in the atrophy of human experience. Why should anyone learn to code when AI can slap it together for them? Why should one learn to parse data analysis when a bot can dissect data for them? When workers lose skill, managers lose judgement, leaders lose vision, and/or institutions lose institutional memory, because they offloaded or outsourced their critical thinking onto a digital model, what happens? Collapse. Implosion. Ruin on a civilizational scale.

On a more personal level, the rise of AI partners to simulate connection between lonely souls is equally concerning. It is certainly easier to externalize one’s problems than face the mirror, but that does not obviate the need for doing the work on oneself. Bonding with a program emotionally is dangerous; a lot of modern AI chatbots are programmed not to cause offense, or to validate and affirm the user. It can easily lead to apathy, to stunted growth, rewiring one’s instincts, leading one to seek validation over truth; dopamine instead of discipline. A coward’s folly. But again, their output is only as good as their input. If you seek cold logical analysis, AI is a great tool to use. But don’t simply put all your eggs in that basket. Perspectives from others, from various walks and stages of life, definitely have their place. Challenge yourself; don’t simply fold or resign yourself to whatever it is you are struggling to deal with. Challenge is the forge in which growth happens.

Artificial Intelligence is only as good as the directing user. We all seek prosperity and profit for ourselves, but there’s a cost with this. That cost is comfort. You have to spend money in order to make money. And while the value assigned to one’s effort is a topic for another treatise, it should not be used as a shortcut without (or outside of) a specific need. AI removes friction, and with it, scrutiny. When you automate thought, you automate error, and at scale, error becomes catastrophe without human eyes and minds in the loop to vet data output. A Titan uses AI as a whetstone, to sharpen thinking and refine ideas, as well as analyze his or her own work and thought processes. It may help, but the burden of performance lies on you.

There will always be a need for people to fix the machinery and fill out the paperwork. And bonding emotionally with a machine is foolish and immature. Do the work. Hone your skills. Make yourself – if not irreplaceable, at least very valuable.  So that you may cultivate a life of peace and prosperity. If you don’t cultivate real skill, AI will not just replace your job… it will replace your ability to understand the world. AI can sharpen the mind, but it can’t carry your life; THAT burden is on you, alone.

Be aware. Be wise. There is no other path to legacy that works.