What do you think is the future of AI?
By Andrew R. Duckworth
Pandora’s box has been opened, and we are only just now seeing the fruits of the labor of plenty of tech oligarchs throughout the world… and those fruits are rotten. Whether you are against generative AI in film, television, and throughout the artistic endeavor or you are against constant surveillance leading to a surveillance state nightmare, in today’s world, you have plenty to be concerned about. We are barraged with nonstop AI—from “artists” who have to constantly affirm for themselves that their AI generated slop is art, to politicians who don’t think it is such a bad thing that an AI assisted surveillance camera be placed pointing towards your front doorstep, AI crept into daily life and there’s no putting the genie back in the bottle.
This, of course, comes after years of warnings, not just from those who speculated about our future under something as dangerous as AI, but from the very industries that developed it to begin with. In the biggest slap of irony, many who touted that AI could lead to severe future consequences advanced the cause of AI and claimed that those without it would be left behind.
Let me be clear… the only AI I utilize is the AI that has been forced upon us by search engines. One is hard pressed to find a search engine that does not have some sort of default AI that can’t be turned off. Beyond this, I refuse to utilize it, even as a tool. I have seen what it does to those who utilize it as such. It begins as a helpful tool for searching, etc. and then later becomes an essential part of life. What this does, in return, is ensure that someone never learns skills that I believe are necessary. Dependance on machine learning has made sure that we do none of the actual learning ourselves. And now, we may have generations of people that, apart from their handy AI tools, lack essential knowledge and skills. To make matters worse, there are actual educational institutions that utilize AI in and out of the classroom, something I think is akin to educational self-harm (because we apparently are not allowed to post the other term). Now, there are monitors in the classroom that still are able to facilitate some form of human to human communication. But what happens when budget cuts must be made? They inevitably will be made. And, I have to imagine, these monitors might be first on the list of nonessentials. It will be a devastating moment for education and the learning process. As an educator and as someone who learned in a classroom, I know just how essential human to human communication is—not just at a social/emotional level, but for the entire learning process. It is something that machines will never be able to give us, lacking the human quality.
Im not necessarily hopeful when it comes to our future these days. A hope that I have is an entirely unrealistic one—that the right people are put in power who actually care for humanity and see the inherent dangers in something like AI, those who would put an end to it all together. But, let’s face it, there is far too much money to be made by AI. Those who are currently in power who are against data centers and the like are more than likely responding to poll numbers which means, after an election, they are likely to go right back to helping Silicon Valley billionaires in their drive to enslave us to a sort of technocracy.
So, to give an honest and realistic answer, I see AI controlling every facet of human existence at some point in the not too distant future. It will be a harsh world of endless technology, constant degradation of nature, and an ever-evolving moronic state of the world… not terribly far off from the one we currently see. If we want to continue the trend of less education and more reliance on machines, we are on the current path. Thankfully, some counties have seen the fruits of allowing such destructive forces in the classroom and have acted accordingly (looking at you, Scandinavian nations… thank you for your example). But I see little hope for my own nation, the USA, under the current state of things.
