There are many benefits to A.I., such as being able to generate beautiful art, inspiring music, captivating writing, and mesmerizing videos. It democratizes creation (people can now create what’s in their minds), lowers costs (replacing human labor with algorithms), and enables hyper-personalization (works can be made just for you). The benefits are big and important.
But there is also something soul-crushing about it. People spend decades learning a craft and then see an A.I. make something in a few seconds or minutes that other people see as comparable to their own work.
And it will be widely misused: to create ripoffs of copyrighted works without giving credit, to generate billions of pages of low-quality content in order to game search engines, to make hyper-personalized spam and commit phishing and fraud, to mislead the public with misinformation and customized persuasion and outrage bait, and to create even more intense social media and video addiction.
Then, there are the longer-term consequences of this kind of technology, which are hard to predict but may be truly catastrophic (even according to some of the leaders who run these very companies).
Humanity sometimes creeps along cautiously – as with the development of new medicines, where we (arguable) allow millions to die based on the fear of releasing something unsafe (which is, to a meaningful extent, a legitimate fear – getting the tradeoffs right is hard). And in the case of nuclear power, where regulation impedes its development due to (mostly) ungrounded fears.
Yet with A.I., humanity plunges forward into the abyss at full speed, with no breaks, with the train conductors announcing to the passengers that we can’t predict where the trains are going, that this all may end up a disaster, perhaps cataclysm, as they shovel exponentially more coal into their white-hot furnaces.
This piece was first written on April 11, 2024, and first appeared on my website on April 16, 2024.
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