Thinking Out LoudI’ve been AI-pilled and I want to vomit – which a bot will never do because it doesn’t have innards to expel.
Silicon Valley CEOs and AI researchers claim artificial generative intelligence (AGI) is 2-3 years away. Course they do: the promise is a siren song to lure investors.
But say this isn’t just tech boosterism, and that AGI won’t simply regurgitate existing content but can think, plan, strategise, and imagine the way humans do. I mean, I’m sceptical, but still feel queasy about it all.
I fear that AGI will do enough of those things, adequately, to put us out of work. Plenty of industries have undergone automation, but white-collar workers like me have, so far, escaped unscathed. Not for long, perhaps. Apparently, AGI is already threatening grad positions. If true, pity young people who’ve spent two decades preparing for a world of work whose days are numbered.
And if people are falling for their chatbots, or being moved to tears by its kind, attentive therapy, then all bets are off. Maybe AGI reveals enough of a “ghost in the machine” to make us redundant.
That phrase is linked with ideas about the mind or soul (ghost) existing separately from the body (machine). Something to do, perhaps, with the mystery of human consciousness that’s now paired with yet another mystery: if bots can replace us, then what is the human exactly?
If we’re just efficient (ok, not so efficient) information processors, then AGI is our successor species. Thanks humans, they’ll take it from here.
But if we’re more than that – if we’re creatures who love and cry, and who have guts that churn and hearts that yearn, the surprise lesson of AGI might be the discovery of our true humanity.
This Thinking Out Loud was first published on Facebook.