The future is now old man. Or woman. Or them. The Fourth Industrial Revolution is in full swing, and despite the risks of leaping into tomorrow’s world prematurely, the cat has already been let out of its bag.
Regenerative large language learning models are just the start and we have a lot more to look forward to. Every day, news of technological and digital “advancements” and innovations grace headlines, as glimpses of artificial intelligence’s (AI’s) infiltration into every facet of our society and individual lives emerges. It comes prepacked as data mining, machine learning, speech and image recognition, and sentiment analysis, carving the pathway of our future, with innumerable uses, and just as many misuses.
OpenAI’s co-founder, Ilya Sutskever, and their head of alignment, Jan Leike, have described AI and its application as a “vast power of super-intelligence that could lead to the disempowerment of humanity or even human extinction” and said that we “don’t have a solution for steering or controlling a potentially super-intelligent AI, and preventing it from going rogue”.
Technological “singularity” is imminent. The day fast approaches when technological progress becomes so rapid and exponential that it surpasses human intellect, and humans will be overtaken by artificially intelligent machines, or cognitively enhanced biological intelligence.
But before we deal with the problems of the runaway effect of an ever-increasing artificial intelligence, in a future where humans are unable to understand or control the technology that we have created, we would first need to deal with the challenges of the human being in control of AI, the overreach of power, and the detrimental effect of forced governance and compliance for citizens and humanity as a whole.
At face value, government and business policy takes its mandate from the World Economic Forum, shaped under ESG (environment, social and governance), with the intention of influencing civilization as we know it, and technology proposed as an additional element as ESGT.
Initial motives might have been born altruistically to address the impact of industry on the environment but its implementation has raised concerns. The model is akin to a social credit score system for business, coerced through a carrot-stick approach to access funding and investment for compliant businesses. The potential is to roll out compliance to individuals as well, much like China’s “social credit” system — digitised, automated and penalised. Whereas ESG is still a voluntary exercise for business, individuals might not have the same privilege.
China first announced their outline for the construction of a social credit system in 2014 as “an important component part of the socialist market economy system and the social governance system”, constructing a moral ranking system that monitors the behaviour of its citizens and ranks them based on their “social credit”.
The Chinese government aims to reinforce the idea that “keeping trust is glorious and breaking trust is disgraceful”, punishing individuals with throttled internet speeds, banning access to flights and even barring their children from enrolling in higher education if the Communist Party deems them untrustworthy.
1984 Orwellian comparisons are not exclusive to the totalitarian Far East but alive in the apparent democratised West as well. Following recent riots in France, sparked by pension reforms, and further escalated by the killing of an unarmed teenager by police, the French parliament passed laws granting police the authority to remotely activate cameras, microphones and GPS systems on phones, laptops and cars of its citizens and residents.
The government systems leverage artificial intelligence, using facial recognition, geo-tracking and social media data, scraping variables to create risk profiles for anyone in the public, and they are confirmed for use at the 2024 Olympics in Paris.
Booked on the next card may be the right to come and go freely and right of autonomy over our physical bodies. As World Economic Forum founder Klaus Schwab wrote in his book The Fourth Industrial Revolution, “As capabilities in this area improve, the temptation for law enforcement agencies and courts to use techniques to determine the likelihood of criminal activity, assess guilt or even possibly retrieve memories directly from people’s brains will increase … Even crossing a national border might one day involve a detailed brain scan to assess an individual’s security risk.”
Self-driving cars sound like a wonderful idea, until the doors lock without prompt and the car drives you to the police station for unpaid parking tickets.
With implanted brain-computer interface devices approved for human testing, such as Elon Musk’s Neuralink, one day you will be able to start your Tesla by blinking your eyes … twice … or by just initiating that thought. The “enhancement” could also come with severe consequences for personal thoughts that are not approved by your government.
Is our integration with technology stripping away individual rights or are tin-foil hats required to the party? It’s a wild world, especially when the right to security, right to a private life and right to private correspondence are restricted as consequences for non-compliance with mandated policies and laws.
As usual, the industry at the forefront of technological advancement, and making the most gains, is the war industry. Huge amounts of data from satellite and drone imagery can now be evaluated in seconds, and strategy options assessed with pinpoint accuracy to minimise the risk of casualties for “us” and maximise death and destruction for “them”.
The conflict in Ukraine is driving AI innovation for the American military industrial complex in their second proxy war with Russia, but since fully autonomous warfare is yet to be achieved, President Joe Biden’s cluster bombs still have a human finger on the trigger.
War wouldn’t be war without the reigning champions in the Middle East, as Israel has already been using AI systems to plan deadly military operations for drone swarms in Syria and Lebanon.
Even Sapiens author, Yuval Noah Harari fears that Israeli democracy is fighting for its life in the wake of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government taking aim to neutralise the supreme court and even questions if “Judaism can survive messianic dictatorship of Israel”.
The idea and responsibility of democracy is either being exposed as a farce, or too ideological for practical application, revealing the more common ideologies of greed, money and power sitting behind the war machines, and now empowered by high-tech capabilities.
The infiltration of technology has also shown massive influence on our minds and psyche. Harari has commented that “AI has hacked the operating system of civilisation”. With the ability “to manipulate our thoughts and actions in ways that we’re not even aware of … It’s like a super-smart hacker who’s figured out how to infiltrate the most complex system on the planet: the human mind”.
Algorithms are designed to analyse vast amounts of data and make predictions about our behaviour by scraping for patterns in our online activity, social media posts, and even our physical movements, and “once they’ve identified these patterns, they can start nudging us in certain directions, without us even realising it” by feeding us suitable content.
The notion is reminiscent of the Cambridge Analytica scandal that influenced Brexit elections in the UK as well as presidential elections in the US, but this time faster, smarter and more effectively run by a computer system instead of people.
Musk attempted to avoid further media manipulation with his purchase of Twitter, now known as X. Since the takeover, Twitter has removed itself from the voluntary EU disinformation code. In response to criticism, Twitter released the internal investigation “Twitter Files” report, criticising information suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop scandal by its previous regime, as well as the $3.4 million received from the FBI as “reimbursement for the time spent processing requests”, including public and private tweets, the content of a user’s direct messages, email IDs and IP addresses associated with the account.
Musk has also been open about his sentiments regarding the undue influence and restriction of speech from distribution of Covid-19 information policies.
Mark Zuckerberg has selected the alternate route of state obedience for Facebook, Instagram and Threads, appointing former CIA analytic manager, Aaron Berman, as senior policy manager for Misinformation at Meta, even after confessing that the “Facebook algorithmically incorrectly censored the Hunter Biden laptop story” a week before the US presidential elections in 2020. Hopefully Dana White can work his magic and the beef gets settled in the octagon and not in the metaverse. Send location.
With various global technological risks, South Africa is safe, because AI systems still require electricity to function. The country’s outlook is less pointed towards the advances of the future than towards the Dark Ages, where the preferred violence is not conducted by automated drones but with tyre necklaces, as blue-light magezas continue to stand on the throat of a nation gasping for reprieve from the savage thugs that hold the country hostage, reducing the value of a human life to a mere R500, and forcing most local tech geniuses to book their flights to the UK and Holland.
For the rest of the developed world, we have been so consumed with the, “so-called” advancement of our species, that we have handed the keys of our future to artificial intelligence, before we could even tap into our own natural intelligence.
But the “achievement” of technological “singularity” where the evolution of a self-learning, self-developing artificial intelligence surpasses the skill and intellectual capacity of the human being, may actually save us from ourselves.
Before we deal with Arnie’s Terminators, we would first need to deal with Orwell’s 1984. Allowing governments to regulate our speech, manipulate our thoughts and restrict our freedoms under the guise of a safer, more prosperous, future is a gullible commitment in favour of our demise. The lies and tyranny of the state are aided and abetted by the moral sacrifice of the individual, as compliance takes precedence over freedom, and we sacrifice our boundaries of expression, bit by bit, in the name of compliance.
In the unabated quest for our advancement, we have become arrogant towards our survival. This is not the first rodeo for human beings. In the Bronze Age, humans developed extensive civilizations, but were wiped off the planet, with reasons still unknown.
Ancient Egyptians built remarkable infrastructure but their technology no longer exists, again, with reasons unknown to our society. Indus Valley civilisations developed their own languages that are now lost. Is this the tale of the human being? A continuous repetition of hubris hurtling towards our own demise? Are we happy to continue riding this wave towards Babylon? Replicating the sins of the father? Alas, poor Yorick.
With instant access to digital records, AI is smarter than you and all your friends or anyone you know. The advent of AI has promulgated knowledge and democratised art. The future is now, old man! ChatGPT is being appointed the chief executive of corporations and AI robot butlers are on pre-order, eager to serve you cappuccinos. Commerce and industry have reached new heights (or lows) and will continue to do so.
Perhaps now our addiction to creating processes, systems and automation can be quelled by the robots and the humans can go back to being humans. Hollywood writers can go on strike over AI labour concerns but research shows that AI is still more creative than 90% of humans.
And yet, we are far more advanced. With all of our tools, and technology and fancy gadgets, the ability to be a human being remains exclusive to the human being. AI may be able to write but it doesn’t have the childhood trauma which allows it to understand the subtleties of sarcasm, and AI may be able to draw a beautiful picture like a real artist, but AI cannot move to Berlin and overdose like a real artist.
The blessing, and the curse, is that we are humans. AI’s vast data is still the sloppy seconds of the lived human experience and the intelligence of nature is far superior to anything artificial. Maybe just a few trillion more variables and you’ll be Guccio Gucci.
If we are to overcome the self-inflicted challenges of technology, we would first need to overcome the intellect and remember the nature that we exist as. At some point, we lost sight of the fact that to harm nature, is to harm ourselves, and we have allowed the avarice of misguided, unaware leaders to guide us towards corrals of illusion, distracted from the consciousness that we are.
The risk of AI is not AI, but the human, and the carnage left in the wake of our ideological attachments. As much as we may assume our expertise and ability to use, misuse, guide or control the remarkable tools that we have created, we will continue to stumble towards our demise as long as the awareness remains external to the human experience.
We are attempting to apply finite rules to infinite games, but the sky is big enough for anyone to fly, and the only option left on the table is to bring higher dimensions of consciousness into our awareness.
Our salvation, as it always has, does not lie towards the external, but internal. We remain infinitely connected to nature, whether we are aware of it or not, or acknowledge it, or not, and it is only in the stillness of our breath that we can remember who we are. No manipulation by our fellow man can tarnish that and no AI can soar these skies.
If we can remind ourselves that whether this human experience is an illusion, a game, simulation, divine revelation or all of the above, that the answer is still love … if we can remember that as a human-being, nothing human can be foreign to us … and that we are not trying to save nature, but that we are nature trying to save ourselves, then perhaps we can step out of our own way, and AI can come along for our ride.
Cappuccinos for the road?
Guru Kali is the director of the Conscious Leadership Academy
The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Mail & Guardian.