All this talk about the end of the world, simply because machines have been trained to speak back to us seems to me less about prophecy and more about progression of fears, as well as another ploy to keep us distracted, divided and stressed out about yet another looming threat (climate, aliens, migrants, banking collapse… where does it end?)
Just as Frankenstein projected his Shadow onto the ‘monster’, every generation that creates something ‘afresh’ fears not only the new tool, but how those with vested interest to subdue, control and cash in on, will appropriate the technology for their own darker desires. After all, the printing press was going to dissolve the memory of a whole civilisation, whilst the railway was going to shatter the nervous system with speeds the body was never built for. Today, it is a machine that talks, and the same old apocalyptic reflex puts on a new coat and walks out into the papers again.
It is not that AI might end the world. I believe that so many of us have already handed so much of agency over to technology, that our attention, our ability to discursively reason, and our hunger for convenience and speed, that some part of us knows the consequence of our diminishing humanity. Perhaps the panic about AI is Saturn's bill for decades of outsourced thinking, dressed up as a story about silicon rather than about what we are consenting to actualise as a society?
I, for one, hold no romance about what these tools are. A machine trained on the residue of human language is not thinking, despite whatever their makers say in their launch events. I have watched it fail at the simplest tasks of memory, let alone it ability to be honest, to know its polish for what it is - a very good impression of understanding worn like a mask over nothing.
But the world will not end because of it, any more than it ended when the loom came for the weavers or the camera came for the portrait painters. Yes, something will be lost, as something is always lost. And yes, grief for that loss is a reasonable and even necessary response. What is not reasonable is mistaking a mirror for a monster and forgetting to ask what it is showing us about the desire that conceived it in the first place…
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