I recall, as a young child, going to a Kids’ Christmas Party at my father’s work.
This was back in the day when the world still acknowledged workers are human beings, with lives outside the office; back when families were recognised as a support structure for workers’ mental and physical health, in such ways ‘the firm’ never really can be.
Anyway, at this particular party they’d hired a magician, and I still recall a trick he did with a miniature guillotine. It had a small hole cut through the panel that obscured the end of the blade’s travel, and it was through this hole that he feed a large carrot. Then, with a flourish, he slammed the sharp blade down, cleanly cutting the carrot in two! He did this a couple of times to demonstrate just how ‘dangerous’ the device was.
And then asked for a volunteer’s finger from the audience!
I might have been 6 or 7 and, like most of the other kids there, I was absolutely not sacrificing any of my digits for the entertainment gods. But, the magician assured us, it was only a “vegetable guillotine” and perfectly safe for fingers. Sure enough, he eventually managed to persuade one of the older kids to stick their finger in the hole and…
CHOP! Off came their finger!...
No—joking, of course! It was all fine, and us kids were wowed and amazed by this ‘magical, vegetable-only, guillotine’.
For the past few newsletters, I’ve been drilling into what Artificial Intelligence might mean for society.
Catch up here:
Unfortunately, you’ll find quite a lot of potential-bad in there! And none of this is helped by the fact that the huge, trillion-dollar corporations—pile-driving AI into our collective consciousness—are:
a) ethically, not focused on the day-to-day problems of ordinary people; and
b) socially, exist in the same general constellation as kids-party entertainers: Insofar as their future prospects are entirely dependent on convincing both naïve children that their act is genuine magic… and also convincing the confused and bedraggled (but apparently sensible) parents as well.
See, AI, like most new technologies, is actually fairly dull—hidden trapdoors and distractions—but also, like new technology, magically lifechanging for those that elect to believe in it. This is why the AI corporations are so insistent on making you understand the ‘threat’ of AI and the requirement for regulation:
“If this thing can potentially cut a carrot cleanly in-two, we need to make sure only us ‘genuine magicians’ get to press on the chop-chop lever!”
Magicians—like techno-industrialists—never reveal their secrets…
Because, even the simplest of ideas, protected by secrecy or regulation or ignorance, can be a super-power… (regardless of whether your audience is made up of kids or customers, parents or politicians)
I should apologise. I really did need to frame the scope of all this up for you, but I also promised this newsletter would be more ‘upbeat’ than the last few… so I’m going to try to be nice now!
When I was younger, it was normal to hold 20-30 7-digit phone numbers in your head at any time—your friends, extended family, local fish’n’chip shop and so on. It’s fair to say, technology made that topical-necessity completely unnecessary now. And AI is absolutely going to do the same sort of thing:
Just the other day I was throwing my hands up in exasperation over the thousands of little digital notes I have spread across multiple apps—not properly tagged or linked in any way—to the extent that I have no idea what little gems-of-ideas might be hidden among them. There’s undoubtably an AI app for that—now, or in the very near future…
AI will help to lift us out of creative ruts. It will help to expose a huge number of people to education and knowledge in ways that have never been so accessible before. It will make many of the inefficient things we accept as ‘inevitable’—like having to remember strings of random numbers—just disappear.
I’m deliberately not even mentioning the bunch of other potential benefits to super-pattern-recognising AI tools, because there’ll be plenty of propaganda and fizzy venture capitalist demonstrations to show off that stuff over the next few years. We’ll almost certainly come to thank AI-supported programs for disease cures and new energy-generating efficiencies, and ever more speedy ways to work.
What I want to think about here though is less about the possibilities of the technology itself, and more how it’s going to scratch and tickle our social surfaces in the next few years.
Most of us spend a remarkably large amount of time doing dumb life-admin shit. So far this millennium, it seems technology has been pretty focused on sticking its nose in on that stuff. Only, I don’t really want to have every interaction with my family be through the video lenses of some Apple Vision Pro headset or something; with my teenage daughter ‘dialling me out of sight’ when I ask her how her day went! I don’t want my drive for greater efficiency to involve my wife, standing literally beside me in the kitchen, gesturing calendar appointments into my feed to remind me to take out the rubbish and pick up milk.
My recent sense has been technology keeps coming along, offering a whole lot of promise—and then just delivering more alienation.
“It would be seamlessly synced with all of your devices and with iCloud... It will have the simplest user interface you could imagine. I finally cracked it.” – Steve Jobs, discussing Apple’s vision for a ‘TV’ 12 years ago. Fascinatingly, it sounds an awful lot like, even back then he was describing the Apple Vision Pro, if you simply imagine TV-watching (like near-everything in capitalism) as an, ‘iCentric’, individual pursuit.
If one possible future is wearing connected ski goggles inside in order to be more efficient with our life admin; then another is an AI reliably and automatically ordering milk and coordinating my rubbish disposal without my intervention. And without any screens at all.
If AI can allow us to take the god-forsaken headsets off our heads and get us to put our phones down, that could be truly wonderful! Imagine knowing, for certain, your credit card bills will be paid on time, and the correct hotel bookings will be made, and you won’t have to remember to add the school concert to your calendar, and there will always be food for the cat. If that’s our AI future, then it’s possible. Possible. That we might find the time and bandwidth for actual human connection again.
Of course, this begs the question of what future ‘human connection’ might even look like.
There’s this concept in techno-nerdery known as the ‘Centaur’ advantage. The basic idea is that an AI and a human are stronger than either an AI or a human alone. The classic example of this in practice points out how a human chess genius like Garry Kasparov can be beaten by a computer; but a computer together with Garry Kasparov can beat a computer alone.
Guys like Ray Kurtzweil—who, frankly, has had an astonishingly good record of predicting this stuff—is convinced that the next logical step therefore is a ‘Singularity’, which would merge AI and human capability seamlessly together, to create, essentially, a ‘new’ combination-being. I’m actually not going to chime in with too much with opinions about the likelihood of that, because Kurtzweil is a smart guy and, despite plenty of other futurists casting doubt, it would be, well, imprudent perhaps to bet against one of the most consistently-accurate socio-technical futurists of our time!
Honestly, all that really matters is, whether the possibility of becoming a cyborg, or uploading your consciousness into a server farm or into a smoking-hot-new-lab-grown-body, excites you or not right now, it’s probably still going to be the option preferred by most humans if the alternative is something closer to Terminator, The Matrix, or Blade Runner.
Of course, that’s also getting a little ahead of ourselves. The ‘Age of AI’ (for desperate want of a less servile term!) has really just begun, and there’s already some interesting threads being pulled. The simple task of “prompting” AI for results is revealing new forms of human creativity, as taste-makers remix art styles and structures together. After all, a diverse range of technology and culture through history was lamented as “the end of creativity” at its origin—from DJing to photography. However, it’s telling that, even with all the power of a modern camera humans still highly value the skill of ‘seeing’ a great photo opportunity in the world around.
So, assuming we manage the tenuous high-wire act of equitably sharing the technological advancements; and assuming we manage to remain the dominant species on the planet; the final piece of the puzzle to making AI good for us is not forgetting our humanity in the process.
We have a pretty poor record of failing to see humans-in-technology as humans. Insanely, something as simple as putting a person on a bicycle makes us perceive them as 30% less human. This makes an appalling kind of sense of course: We’ve all experienced and participated in road rage, and behaved in ways we never would if we weren’t centaurs surrounded by glass and metal; we’ve all posted nasty comments or frowny faces, on Faceplace or Instatok or whatever, because we’re centaurs, separated from any object-of-our-wrath by miles of 2.4GHz radio waves and fibre-optic cables.
This is fine. It’s human nature. I’m much more likely to jump out of a plane with the security of a parachute than without. Protecting ourselves, to the extent we take greater risks in life, is integral to our greatness. So, security lets us be all we can be… But, to be the far-far greater thing we can collectively be, requires connection, and we should take care not to forget that more than we seemingly already have.
At the end of the day, my sense is that—if we can prevent it from breaking us—AI will highlight what we are.
In my previous series—about UBI—I talked a lot about the idea that money had forgone its value, because we had lost sight of what it was designed to do. Human creativity is a bit like that as well. A big part of how we value a thing is in understanding what that thing exists for—and human creativity exists because we have a biological imperative to release it (this was the point of my first newsletter).
Throughout our history, creativity has been the foundation for the flourishing of our species. Maybe—with self-assembling AIs, and modified organic compounds, and robots—we’ll suddenly find we don’t require creativity for humanity to ‘flourish’ anymore… But, our biology won’t change: We’ll still be driven to create.
Sure, AI might take away all our jobs, but that doesn’t mean it needs to take away our work.
If the stars align, just right, the AI data centres can just keep circulating money for whatever bullshit money is used for now! An AI makes a video, which is ‘watched’ by another AI, and shown advertising for an AI business hosted by an AI advertising bot, that was venture-funded into existence by an AI financing division of an AI private equity fund, consisting of seed money that an AI futures trading bot has invested in an AI start-up that has worked out how to grow free unlimited (delicious) food and build housing out of CO2 emissions, and governments of the world will just continue printing money to buy carbon credits for, as payment for fucking-up their Paris Agreement goals…
And us humans can just go and read a 19th century novel under a tree somewhere.
Or, write a 21st century novel in a café somewhere.
We are made of everything we need to be human and create. We don’t need AI to do it for us, but we may need AI to free us up to do it.
All we need is for enough of us to realise the full potential of humanity lies latent. It lies latent in the drafty shitholes we call ‘rental properties’; in the sugar-laden garbage we call ‘food’; in the high-stress exams we call ‘measurement’. We are hungry to create and to digest the things that humans have to offer. But as long as we are literally hungry—in the service of putting more cash into pockets of people whose life DOES NOT CONTAIN ENOUGH YEARS IN WHICH TO SPEND WHAT THEY ALREADY HAVE—we will never satiate our collective potential.
The catch here is we need to realise what is happening in order to benefit from it. Taking a long email (or long substack newsletter!) and auto-magically turning it into bullets points, then turning those bullet points back into a long substack newsletter, is a neat trick. But it’s really just speed-running the same corporate garbage we’ve been submitting to for the past few decades. Our 15-hour work weeks didn’t never eventuate because we had too much work to do! We can turn things around in fractions of the time now (imagine the months it would have taken to distribute something this to a global audience just 100 years ago!). We’re miles more productive when we’re doing productive work, it’s just we tripped over our own shoelaces on the way to amazing and fell into a vat of ‘turning-copy-into-bullet-points-and-back’ (or insert your own bullshit job here).
Whatever it this thing we’re calling ‘Artificial Intelligence’ becomes in the next few years and decades, is going to come down to what we collectively want from it. AI will be what we are.
We can fall for the propaganda; we can allow the entertainer-magicians, the naïve children, and the beleaguered parents to set the agenda and let it happen to us.
Or we can take a moment to contemplate. We can take a closer look at this trick guillotine. And we can start thinking a bit harder about a good future.
-T