EDITORS DESK
Those, like us, who are at once blessed and cursed to be alive in these exciting, terrifying times, have been raised on a diet of technophobic novels like 1968’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick and films like 1984’s The Terminator and 2001’s A.I.
It’s only natural that many of us are nervous about artificial intelligence (AI), so-coined in the early days of computers back in the 1950s, as if to echo fears of the future that in those times took the form of Martian invasion, the Cold War, and nuclear annihilation. Just as unsettling among the anticipatory anxieties of the decade, even among tech developers, was the idea of “man against the machine,” a direct result of the Turing Test, originally the Imitation Game, as its initiator, English philosopher and computer scientist Alan Turing, called it, which tested in 1950 “a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behavior equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human.”
I think its name is what makes it sound so dangerous. AI sounds almost as menacing as, say, alternate reality or manufactured truth or the walking dead. It’s too late in the game for a name change, but for AI to stop terrifying some of us, even scientists like the late theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, who told the BBC in 2014 that “the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race,” is maybe to stop mythologizing the power of AI, to withhold all thought of it as a monster we are raising, educating, feeding with all our collective knowledge.
But AI could be a monster of mythological proportions. What we are up against, more than AI’s cumulative power, is our natural predisposition toward laziness. This is not a jab at humanity. Human greatness, after all, is the triumph over laziness, just as movement or rising is the conquest of gravity. Sad as it seems, many will have no qualms surrendering the privilege of creation, especially creating from scratch, to AI.
A recent study involving university students in China and Pakistan by a group of researchers from all over the world, from Seoul and Islamabad to Madrid and Santiago, found that AI caused “68.9 percent of laziness in humans, 68.6 percent in personal privacy and security issues, and 27.7 percent in the loss of decision-making.”
Published in June this year on Nature Portfolio, an online collection of multi-disciplinary research and reviews, the study “Impact of artificial intelligence on human loss in decision making, laziness, and safety in education,” in summary, found that we are wired to use the least energy possible in accomplishing tasks and duties. It also expressed a skeptical argument against this technological development, saying, “Accepting AI without addressing the major human concerns would be like summoning the devils.”
There’s the rub. There is no doubt that AI will make life better, but it does have the potential to make life worse than we can ever imagine and that is because, well, two words—human nature. There are no policies set yet to protect us against the lazybones, the poseurs, the greedy capitalists, the zealots, and the terrorists, who are having a field day because, as AI becomes more sophisticated while writers, painters, scientists, engineers, inventors, architects, designers, filmmakers, photographers, philosophers, scholars, and other creators are feeding it with more and more stuff to work with at a prompt, they are sure to have at the tip of their fingers a tool they can use to indulge their respective laziness, pretensions, avarice, fanaticisms and prejudices, or violence and propaganda.
As far back as 1945, American engineer and inventor Vannevar Bush proposed some kind of accountability in the building of digital-network architecture, which computer scientist Ted Nelson seconded in 1960, calling for provenance or, in the context of today’s GPT-style AI, some form of attribution for the vast amounts of user data that this new intelligence can trawl from the web. These initial proposals later provided the foundation for data dignity, a movement forged long before generative AI came about, which calls on developers to address the AI attribution issue.
Maybe the ship has sailed and we are far too gone in the AI game now that the technology can go as far as inflicting deepfakes on us. Can AI trick us with live videos or photos, replete with real-time updates, to think a missile is on its way? Yes, it can—and with relative ease. Sure, there’s also AI to count on to prove it’s all a trick, but, with hope, not too late, not when the deepfake has stirred enough panic to cause a public emergency.
What we must remember, however, is that AI is what we make it. If it were a creature, we are its trainers. If it were a student, we are its teachers. We can only take from AI as much as we give it. The question is: What are we teaching AI? Are the best of us enough to compensate for the worst of us in shaping AI for the benefit of our race?
Most fearsome is AI’s menace might begin at the schools, our future factory, in which the technology, growing by leaps and bounds, learning faster than Number 5, the prototype robot S.A.I.N.T. (Strategic Artificially Intelligent Nuclear Transport) in the 1986 science fiction comedy film Short Circuit, has every power to make effort optional. Why learn to dot the i’s and cross the t’s when there’s AI-powered grammar checker to rely on? Why read Friedrich Nietzsche when, as of writing, a chatbot is being perfected so you can summon him to help you draw up an essay on his Übermensch, his call for self-overcoming, which might have been a predictive take on AI, for philosophy class?
What will the future generation be like, shaped by AI, and how, in turn, will they shape the future of AI?
(AA Patawaran is the Lifestyle Editor of Manila Bulletin.)