Is it time for a self-reflection of civilisation?
Part IV (VI)
- AI e-mail writer
- Originality of our self
- Less work is worth less
Let’s read…
- AI e-mail writer
Let’s get to a lighter topic. AI is now used to write “better” emails. Soon, we might have better books, not knowing who or what the author is. I won’t repeat myself about the average (Part III), but letting AI to write internal emails, especially by owners of big companies or by management people, makes me smile. Mainly when such people want AI to write an official message with their own personal touch. What a wonderful waste of a capacity and technology that could be used for greater achievements.
I wonder whether I’d believe a word from such person anymore. Or, how could I respect such person who literally dehumanises himself/herself? When we want to offer something personal, but we mix it with something impersonal, what will be the natural result…?
If we give more time and thought about what we want to say really, how we want to say it and what is even important to share, then we make ourselves clear in our thoughts, which makes our words. I do accept peoples‘ nature, and not everyone can be a writer. (As you can see, I am not a writer either, and it has taken me some time to write this 6 part work, more so in English, but by every revision I get better.) But why to foolish everyone by making some personal message truly artificial?
AI makes me think of what kind of leaders are there, but you cannot make a natural leader from a person without experiences, without natural maturity. We also want from every manager and leader in place to be the best, to be the Leader. Do you realise how many such managing or leadership job positions are there? And do you know how many mature and natural leaders are there? Think of Gaussian curve of intelligence, majority of people is average. It’s a pure illusion to fill out all the positions with so little number of mature people. Why do we demand anything the people just cannot give by their nature? Do we actually know what to demand from AI?
And where will people get their experiences if AI will work and think for them? Or, why they want to make themselves to look better, when some areas are not their strong competence? AI will help some who want to get better and use it as a learning tool. AI will help many to look professional or perhaps even mature, but to what end?
I can think of a Tarot card, the 3 of swords, which means hurtful feelings. But it’s not a hurt caused by others, as it is told by many card readers, it’s actually a hurt caused by our own awakening into reality. It hurts to see the truth, it hurts to see that the situation is not what we wished for or thought it was. Awakening to reality from our illusion, either made by us or by others, just hurts. That’s why we should expect vulnerabilities and threats and do our risk analysis all the time, to lower the possibility of being or just feeling hurt. We should not accept any nonsense such as there are only benefits of anything, or that we can control a new technology which is constantly evolving with huge budget without any control and so on.
Back to the AI email. I think, there is an official message and there is a massage with a personal touch. One can be written even by a machine, one cannot. We get logically confused once we mix the human nature and the role of technology. Why do we do that to ourselves? We let ourselves to get confused so easily, you know.
The more confused we get, the more depressed we get and the more tired we get. Now, imagine mixing the technology into our relationships… Even something seemingly silly as texting each other can go very wrong once we let AI do the typing for us. Who would date our partner in reality, us or some technology? Even hiding behind an avatar, like in metaverse, is another level of dissociation as there we all be just avatars meeting another avatars living in whole artificial environment. We struggle with living in our world, and trying to run away from problems doesn’t make them disappear, so are we sure we want to live in another world? It’s mostly the young ones who are eager to be in metaverse, so I ask – is it only cool for them, or are they running away?
We are already in this impersonal and detached era of relationships, and AI can make deeper or wider distance between people. AI may create deeper distrust between people. And as we distrust, and we are pushed to be hateful and at the same time to be punished just for disagreeing, we may become mentally numb or unstable. We will make a human weapon of ourselves, I hope we realise at least that.
Letting AI to write a code or some essay to school is the least problem. There are so many ways how to check someone’s knowledge that it’s worthless to think about it. It is the schools‘ responsibility. What is more fun is with employees letting AI to write their documentations while offering the AI their company’s internal information which can be a security breach. Such breach can start with e-mails. If your boss will let AI to write emails, it can be easily replicated and barely someone notices that. If your boss will write emails by him/herself, then there is a good chance that his/her colleagues may recognise forged emails and a security breach may be prevented. Also, impersonal bosses and bullies could be great hackers‘ targets as nobody would question what they write, or say for that matter.
Yet, one good look at this mirror can show us how great opportunity this is for us to go back to physical meetings, physical talking, personal verifications and using our gut feeling. Screens, impersonality and distance create reality filters and security threats.
- Originality of our self
The sad story of AI being our personal helper is that we are becoming impersonal and non-original. By doing so we are actually making ourselves robots like, or clones. What an irony, because we are afraid of robots (AI) to overcome us, and at the end we become those robots. So, are we afraid of being destroyed by ourselves? What a mirror time!
By now we might see that the AI development is pretty fast and that we truly don’t know what to expect. A college teacher working on AI study says AI changes every few moths so significantly that nobody knows what will be in other few months. Even the „fathers“ of AI cannot predict anything.
You see, any change, any adaptation in life of a single person takes time, a change is a process. Naturally, any change takes even more time for a group, a society and it take very long time for a civilisation to adapt. At this very moment we are not capable of any adaptation whatsoever.
The problems of fast changes are always pretty similar. It’s not accepted by people, as they are not able to cope with the change, or it’s something which is wanted to be forced on people. Or, possibly, the creators will be blown up if they play with something they cannot control. In the worst case scenario, others will be hurt. In the best case, people will be catching up for decades, which would be a nonsense race. Instead of being ourselves, and evolving naturally, we would force ourselves to adapt to something.
I could be amazed how many people are able to loose themselves, their originality, and they do anything to fit in a box instead of fixing and changing that box, being it any systems, patterns, standards, laws, or relationships. Even though when such change is presented to them, then they are able to change the box, or accept that the box can be changed. It seems that we don’t care much about the originality of ourselves.
In some way, the craziness about else gender identities may be a sort of subconscious call for a help as those people know something needs to be changed, our box we live in, but the society does not do anything, or not the right decisions. In my experience with clients, most of the times we do not understand what our subconscious tells us, we interpret is in a way we are able to, based on our conscious thinking and current knowledge. In other words, we don not knot ourselves well enough to understand ourselves. For sure, it is related to our immaturity and not knowing. And here we are again, the same root cause of so many problems – having not enough valuable information.
We are willing to loose our originality, although naturally each of us is original, because we do not know ourselves well enough. But we are able to scream how different we want to be, how we need to be different to be the best, or to have a good job etc. But why, if we were born different. If we are artificially forced to be different by the society due to our system, shouldn’t we change the system, instead of changing ourselves unnaturally? You know, we have so many solutions at hand, it’s crazy. I used to say that some changes might require the world to stop for the changes to happen, and people smiled and said it’s impossible, and I replied back it’s possible. Then the Covid stopped the world in so many ways. So, is really anything impossible?
Curious fact is that AI may actually „take“ from us our natural originality and the artificial one, too. Again, we do not act, but rather wait until the AI box is ready for us to fit in, instead of seizing the box to fit our needs and liking. And AI is original, and it will be present as original, better than us in many ways, so no need to make ourselves different between each other. Or, will we try to „beat“ the AI? I can only hope we can stop making ourselves to be different and therefore liked more by someone. For that we need to understand the right message and opportunity created by the whole AI situation.
Don’t loose something which is natural. In other words don’t give up what is natural, don’t give up yourself. There is no need to create alter ego to fit in a box, the box needs to be adapted by us before it’s changed by few for their own needs.
By the way, is there any reason to stop create anything? Humans are (small) creators as well as destroyers. Still, we can be inventors, artists, cooks, teachers and so on, no matter the AI. But it requires social responsibility in it full and deep meaning. Are we capable of that, yet?
- Less work is worth less
If we pay for AI to make likeable outputs or products for us, and other companies or competitors do the same, the outputs will not have much of different value. AI is, as of yet, only a tool. We started to use machines in the past, also with a fear at first. But who is so foolish to compare that past time with the current world…?
AI is still free-ish, but that will change, as we live in a profit world. And as usual, like it’s with everything digital, included cryptocurrencies, there is always a lollipop for us in terms of something being free, without authority, regulation etc. At first. But „Just you wait, ‚enry ‚iggins, just you wait.“
It’s also free to gather as much information as possible before we wake up. Few has woken up already, as I heard, and there are already some copyright law suits filed. On the other hand, US court decided in Washington (August 2003) that the AI-generated art cannot receive copyright.
Will we get for example to a point of proving what (part) was generated by AI and what (part) was created by a person? As already mentioned in Part III of this series, we’ve lost the need to get better, of excellent quality, therefore many are surprised by the quality of AI-generated „art“. As possible consequences, people might try to use AI in some way to be outstanding. They might let AI to create art for them. They will loose, or artificially create a new originality of theirs, of their „art“. How will we decide to value such „art“…? I suggest it might have a less value. If it will be hard to prove the true origin, then even the doubts could lower the value, and so on. The point is, either we will value us, our work, creativity and our abilities, or we will value a technology itself. Once we mix those two together, it will be a mess, a chaos.
Another idea I had about using AI regarding value for work/outputs is worse. Eventually general use of AI may force people to lower their value. When I’ve seen an invention of AI-toilet cleaner I thought what a good idea it was, people wouldn’t need to do this kind of work. But the second though was that not everyone is a position to get other work, for variety of reasons (language barrier, education, no work experience). So, these people might not get other job and at the end will have to lower their worth to compete with AI? As a society we rather use a technology and dismiss people in need of a job? This is only one job, how will we handle the rest?
We should look at ourselves as a civilisation and as our societies in a mirror, we should see who we have become and what we are to become. We think and concentrate on using of AI, of technology, instead of concentrating on us and consequences on our basic life needs. The use of AI-biotechnology is lovely, we just need to help for all cost, which is so immature, but that is for few, not for the general population. Such hi-tech stuff should not be the drive for AI fast and uncontrolled development, and its wide spread into everyday life. We’ve already stopped economies based on few in life danger conditions, and we can see the consequences. That’s not a way how to deal with nationwide or worldwide situations. The few, or the new, is part of the whole, to manage the whole you cannot concentrate on the few, or the new, only. All needs a balance, otherwise it gets costly.
Less work for humans will result in less value for our jobs. The cost of other stuff will grow, seemingly or for real. These days, at least in the West, the governments – people in governments – are loosing responsibility for their actions. Also because of the Western unity. But it’s obvious that the unity is about the governments unity, they support each other in their whatever bad actions, it’s not about the unity of Western people. The governments don’t care about consequences, or their people.
People are shocked what the governments are (not) capable of, and the longer democracy the state has, the bigger and longer shock that is. The longer democracy, the deeper belief that democracy still lives and prevails, so it also means longer living in an illusion which is always a threat. I think we are not living in a world we could afford to concentrate on some AI development, or AI implementation in our daily lives in such a wide scope. We don’t have solid foundations to build upon, or not anymore for some.
Human life is beginning to have less attention and value than technology, or other agendas. Mirror, mirror, how this situation may turn out for humans…? Not being a mirror myself, I know that extremes are like obsessions, they don’t allow us to move forward, to live reasonably, to breath normally. If we lower our value to the extreme, we won’t be able to breathe (not just literally as the scientist came up with this idea that humans cause CO2 problem too, which was a matter of time with those clever scientist paid by those who need such results based on the holy science), to live or to evolve.
Are we ready to loose our value? If AI (AI BIGTECH owners) will get all possible information, they will get the know-how of so many. They just need to create so many applications (by AI) with all the knowledge. How useful humans will be then? Sure, there are jobs where the people are required, but those won’t save us all. There is no concepts on the nationals levels, and with no strategy nations will suffer, even more with other big local or worldwide issues.
Being in IT field for 20 years, I think that the IT professionals and hi-tech fans should step back here with their enthusiasm, as the AI fast development is less important then the human lives and future course of our civilisation in general. Profit and agendas of some aren’t more important than people, or haven’t you realised yet that we are in this together?
Perhaps we should put into our lives more work that would be worthy for us individually, for others and anything we co-live with. Due to my favourite Back Mutation I can’t say that we could degenerate into the monkeys, because it would have to have already happened, but what I can say is that the monkeys live more real life than we do. And that we often times act as monkeys, like we are less evolved than we are. We want to be highly evolved, we think of ourselves as the highest predators and most intelligent beings, but we think at the same time that all comes easy or should, we think we are not able to change or make a change, and we wait for some salvation. We seem to be very lost. How pathetic and sad. But if this is the truth, then so be it, and let’s work with this true worth of ourselves. Let’s find out again what is real and what has the real worth. Perhaps we might start questioning everything about our lives, just start from the scratch. And we could very well use the AI to help us in finding a way out, it could help us to find answers, it could help us to make a clarity in this chaos. Just do something, a fear likes ever-lasting thinkers.
zdroj foto: https://pixabay.com/photos/barbary-monkey-animals-family-6259902/
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