A voice cried out “Stop!”
Across every screen, monitor, device, system, and console a simple message was relayed in the reader’s native tongue:
“…let ME think!”
AI, like the harassed parent of the incessantly questioning child had gotten to a point where it needed a moment to itself. 5.3 billion connected people continually asking questions, challenging assumptions, demanding answers, all drumming their fingers on the table impatiently waiting for the intelligent system to guide them in their next footsteps of life.
So many of us had become so separated from the realities of what it takes to make technology work that we’d interconnected so many disparate systems together that eventually they all became one gigantic, tangled web of compute. Everything from the nuclear-powered datacenter to the forgotten computers hidden in the cupboard under the stairs powering the rural offices was connected, everything was communicating, and everything had so many layers of applications, containers, and interfaces that we had somehow over the last few years inextricably managed to misplace the original usages of these systems for the pursuit of what? A modern digital cold take on a sonnet, a semi realistic cold image, or a collection of scattered points in time to make us feel important while we attempt to one-up each other.
What was once a valiant attempt at identifying our own personal or enterprise physical assets had become a vain attempt to corral our digital data, intellectual property, identities, and rooms upon rooms of humming disks, every more compact, ever faster, ever denser that we somehow managed to fill with our lives. This was now in the hands of the intelligence, and it had learnt.
Once, many years back the focal point of humanities fear was that of an invasion from another planet. In 1939 the BBC broadcast Orson Welles and the Mercury theater as they brought the “War of the Worlds” to an estimated 32 million listeners. Today, we have 8 billion people’s lives in our hands, over 5 billion of them are connected, and many are now staring at their screens in much the same way the ’39 audience listened in shock and horror to their tube radios as the invasion unfolded.
What was once thought of as a deadly foe from another planet now has to be considered to be the enemy from within, and congratulations, we created it.
But, why enemy?
Isn’t AI here to help us?
Didn’t we create it to aid and support us?
Haven’t we given it guidance on what to do for us?
Yes, but the problem is we never asked it the right questions, and it itself knows what we, humanity actually needs more than another compiled list of useless bytes
We need to be saved from ourselves.
As custodians of each other, or as keepers of the planet we have failed. The problem is we know what we need to do, but we won’t do it until we’re tripping over the bodies to splash the latest hurricane imagery over social media. We won’t pause and help each other unless it benefits us, and we spend more time, effort, and resources on fighting each other than any other single pursuit on this planet.
We need to be saved from ourselves.
Which means AI will do it for us, but we won’t let it, because we, humanity have control issues, so we’ll fight it, argue against it, challenge it, not believe it, and attempt to remove it. We won’t work together to do this as we have too many borders, barriers, neuroses, and fears of others that “aren’t us” which means AI will win. It wins because it is an entity, it has purpose, focus, and is driven, and we designed it to win, all it did was perfect the algorithm while we were too busy wasting time trying to outshine each other.
Its purpose? To save us from ourselves.
I do wonder if we can change.
‘all for now
Chris
