Kudos on earning a world full of chaos! What exactly was our endeavor? Making our lives easier, better, improving its quality? By becoming inorganic from organic? By ceding space to artificial from natural? By promoting what’s built in laboratories on support against what grows and evolves from experiences?
Thus, it doesn’t seem to be an endeavor to make lives easier, better or improve their quality. It most surely appears to be the quest to be in control and be superior. It’s about developing abilities that could be tamed to do something and everything that we want to enhance our potential.
But are we in control and are we superior to what we were before developing and nurturing artificial intelligence? Are we in control or are we subservient to the monster we created? Are we really superior to it or are we now fighting to figure out our position against it?
Or was it about the ages old pursuit of becoming a superhuman? Out of the fantasies and comics and in real life? Yeah, in real life through artificial abilities! The ability to be something or a lot more than what we actually are, has always been enticing. And now this race has morphed into the struggle for global dominance.
Let me first break it down. The monster I’ve referred to here is the Generative AI. Because just like its peer in tech type, the self-driving cars, Generative AI also has little to no safe use data available resulting not just in incidents or accidents, but ultimately in catastrophic failures! Yes, corporate failures are catastrophic because we don’t invest in corporates to fail!
By category classification it is the deep learning that is being touted as a replacement for human intellectual interventions based on its ‘promising’ abilities of content generation, being better or faster than human mind. Indeed, the opportunity to replace the use of human mind is a cause to celebrate, especially when it was this human intellect that was behind the development of deep learning!
Just to be clear, this is not about being averse to enhanced efficiencies, greater productivities and even better abilities to be perfect in what we do. Being an internal auditor, no one in his / her right mind could be averse to it, simply because we strive for it and that’s a key idea behind internal audit interventions.
And evolving use of Machine Learning continues to result in efficiencies, productivities and perfection as we continue to customize the algorithms of our creations to our requirements and advantages. But Deep Learning also isn’t actually a suicidal mission.
It’s the lack of safe use guidelines for deep learning and prohibition of its use on the basis of age groups and purposes that’s causing the mayhem. Well, you may think of adding maturity / coming of age to that list of prohibitions too! It’s interesting how we don’t want to come of age and how it won’t let us!
I mean I find it impossible to wrap my head around this content generation ability of the deep learning. How is asking a real seasoned, experienced person a question is not better than asking tech? Sometimes we don’t have access to experienced people or it’s more convenient to ask tech than to access a person to ask a question. But relying on its answers as complete and accurate information and using it for specific decision making, is really what it should be used for?
What exactly is it’s content generation / analytical ability good at?
- Creating content that never existed before sourced from content that exists globally?
- Creating fake content so that the users could glee about the endless possibilities to ruin anything?
- Creating content that summarizes the concepts tech ‘thinks’ is important while leaving the rest?
- Creating content that aids in fake projections, marketing and propaganda?
- Creating content that presents as the real deal and is used to deceive and cheat?
- Creating content that causes the academia to use even better tech to ascertain that they have not been led to believe that the research paper they’re reviewing is not AI generated?
- Creating content that insults human intellect and rips its capabilities to shreds by having itself replace original creation?
- Creating content for use by criminals?
- Analyzing data given without the underlying assumptions used in acquiring and accumulating such data, but is required to be used because it saves time and effort?
- Making comparisons on information given without assessing the factors that impact upon and led to such information?
- Creating strategy, identifying objectives and risks and believing it as Indigenous?
- Hindering efforts for seeking truth, doing research, pursuing knowledge, experimenting, learning!
The idea behind is simple; it’s better to use the tech mind rather than my own! Since my mind is imperfect, or can falter, or is unreliable or not productive enough or I don’t want to use it. The ‘not wanting to use it’ part is the most significant case for this artificial productivity.
We no longer want to spend time using our own grey matter or we’re so mentally fatigued that we want our brain cells to have a prolonged nap! Or maybe we’re looking for a ubiquitous mate who doesn’t challenge us and simply complies! Just replies in affirmative and says what we want to hear and keeps what seems unpleasant to us away.
Isn’t this what being called brain dead is? Taking clue from the theories of evolution, our brain will soon become a vestigial organ. We won’t then need organic food, healthy diet and mental exercises. We just have to learn and master one skill; asking our AI based chatbot a question, any question!
Not knowing an answer used to be fun in the past, we had to put up some efforts to find it and, in the process, used to learn about it. Now we only need to ask our bot and memorize / copy the answer! We don’t need to learn anything and that’s the definition of being smart and productive in the era of AI.
And see we’re already so invested in going artificial now that we’re not talking about the elephant in the room; we’re not concerned about our soon to become extinct mental faculties. Instead, we are more concerned about the use of resources like energy and water in operating AI based systems.
We just have to ensure our bots follow our commands and not those of snooping hackers and of course that’s easy now because thanks to the craze around AI, the budgets for cybersecurity are no longer an issue!
I know someone who takes pride in his use of AI and boasts his ability,
- In preparing executive review papers from AI.
- In getting papers made by others reviewed through AI.
- In having analysis done by AI.
- In having his life fully ‘organized’ by AI and likes to share it with people who consider him a leader (an artificial leader if I may!).
The papers made and the papers reviewed by AI were still reviewed by real people before these could be used and the analysis done by AI was busted by me because the facts around the information analyzed were neither used nor known. The person didn’t think the facts were important. The tragedy is that we are now also required to report to AI, because he believes AI interprets us better to him!
So far, I’ve been eagerly waiting for his AI bot churning out a strategy for him to sell to the Board for causing a chaotic turnaround to the business he’s trying to ‘lead’. So far, it hasn’t happened. Maybe his bot is analyzing his investment in the bot and the entity’s investment in him and the result is not to his liking!
For once I had hoped, the Board also used Artificial Intelligence in finding their executive!
No job is safe from AI, especially the CEO’s!
Alas! Our mental degradation emanating from this blatant nonsensical use of AI will find no real cure, because AI would have replaced doctors by then!
Even though MS Office’s co-pilot tried a lot to assist me to write this piece, I denied it to invade any of my mental space to rip it off my signature originality and individuality!
So, enjoy while fewer and fewer of those of us remain, who have a mind of their own, not aided, abetted and adulterated by AI!