Aren’t we all just SICK of AI? Oh and of Sam Altman too…

A lot of money has been pumped into the artificial intelligence (AI) industry and, as a result, we are now being spammed by the AI hype juggernaut. We get “encouragement” to use AI at work to improve our “productivity” in the tasks of churning out “content”. We are constantly reminded of the “existential threat” AI poses to human civilisation. We get constantly bombarded with news “reports” on what OpenAI founder Sam Altman has to say about the future of humanity in “the age of AI”.

Make no mistake, mainstream media is complicit in the concerted talk-up of this technology. Rather than be the gatekeeper to filter out AI bullshit and prevent it from being legitimised by their ironic “truth-teller” branding, mainstream media outlets are, themselves, adopting the technology to bump up their bottom lines (they are, lest we forget, for-profit businesses) and, worse, compete with mom-and-pop “content creators” infesting the Net.

Thing is, both big businesses and institutions down to these mom-and-pop Netizens are all using AI to “compete”. Where does that bring us then? You guessed it — an Internet polluted with AI effluent — shit emitted at all levels of the social and business hierarchy. The future of the Net is therefore not as rosy as our self- (or media-) crowned technology gods would have us believe. In his personal manifesto on what the future holds for us hapless humans, Altman declares that “in the future, everyone’s lives can be better than anyone’s life is now.”

Although it will happen incrementally, astounding triumphs – fixing the climate, establishing a space colony, and the discovery of all of physics – will eventually become commonplace. With nearly-limitless intelligence and abundant energy – the ability to generate great ideas, and the ability to make them happen – we can do quite a lot.

This is coming from someone who is the recipient of billions in investment on developing AI technology. So trust Sam Altman to try his darndest to convince us that AI — his company’s kind of AI — has a practical use that delivers value commensurate to those billions so far spent on gas-guzzling data centres that emit both physical and digital pollution. That’s like me asking a barber if I need a haircut. One wonders how much of those billions invested in Altman’s “vision” also went into the pockets of all those “journalists” now talking up his technological Nirvana.

History has shown that technologists are not the cluiest of futurists. If we had taken to heart visions of the future produced in 1960s science fiction, we will have, by now, been lounging on plastic furniture eating synthetic food fed to our astronauts all in plastic houses that look like flying saucers. Instead, the best of us still live in brick-and-mortar houses enjoying our creaking solid wood floorboards and cocooning ourselves in cotton sheets. We put a premium on natural organic food and shun the cancerous artificial foods that Big Corporate had, for decades, conspired to shove down people’s throats.

Artificial intelligence — like artificial food, clothes, and stuff — may one day completely permeate human society. That is, after all, the vision of Big Corporate as Altman himself reveals in his ironic manifesto. It will happen because Big Corporate have the resources to make it happen. Indeed, they had already fattened the proverbial sheep for that eventuality with the digital candy (the delivery of which they had turned into a mature science and industry over the last couple and a half decades of the 21st Century) they had been pumping into our devices. While it may be wise to bet short on this future, perhaps the longer bet may be something we may have to think twice about — that is, of course, if people are still capable of human thought by then.

benign0

benign0 is the Webmaster of GetRealPhilippines.com.