Byline Supplement

Byline Supplement

Share this post

Byline Supplement
Byline Supplement
The Corrosive Effects of Social Media Must Warn Us About the AI Revolution Ahead
Copy link
Facebook
Email
Notes
More
User's avatar
Discover more from Byline Supplement
Exclusive weekend investigations and more extended features from the whole Byline team, with weekday forums taking you behind the headlines and building a community based on truth
Over 32,000 subscribers
Already have an account? Sign in

The Corrosive Effects of Social Media Must Warn Us About the AI Revolution Ahead

Kyle Taylor writes a regular column The Tech Effect in the monthly print edition of Byline Times. This is a free sample from the October 2023 edition

Kyle Taylor
Sep 01, 2023
21

Share this post

Byline Supplement
Byline Supplement
The Corrosive Effects of Social Media Must Warn Us About the AI Revolution Ahead
Copy link
Facebook
Email
Notes
More
4
Share

We are now living in the age of artificial intelligence. Not since the dawning of the nuclear era in the 1940s has there been such a stark ‘before time’ and ‘after time’ when considering human evolution. Space travel, the emergence of the internet, and of course the advent of the smartphone were all deeply significant moments. But none seemingly posed an existential threat to humans on their own.

By definition, AI is nothing more than when a computer is capable of doing stuff that ‘intelligent’ beings like humans can do. It’s an idea dating back to Ancient Greece, when philosophers imagined worlds where complex machines – the technology for which was not yet even conceivable – would complete basic tasks and calculations still reserved for humans. 

Byline Supplement is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Modern AI has been a part of our lives for decades, slowly incorporated into most aspects of manufacturing, brick-and-mortar retail, and the digital world. From robots building cars on manufacturing lines to predictive text on smartphones, and social media algorithms that decide which content to place in your feed, AI is deeply embedded in the way we live.

But this new era of what has been deemed ‘generative’ artificial intelligence – where the systems not only perform pre-programmed tasks but also learn from and advance themselves – genuinely crept up on us. 

The public launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT last November seemingly came out of nowhere – and was met with alarm from every corner of society.

ChatGPT’s CEO, Sam Altman, called his own creation an existential threat to humanity. Geoffrey Hinton, the so-called ‘Godfather of AI’, left his job at Google because, he said, “it is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things”. 

In the US, the White House published a blueprint for an AI ‘bill of rights’, and the EU is in the final stages of passing its Artificial Intelligence Act. The UK Government, for its part, has said it will take a solely voluntary approach to oversight.

This led to an immediate focus on the idea that generative AI posed a primary special threat – that the computers will decide to kill us. But while experts agree this outcome could be less than 50 years away, it’s the secondary impacts of AI for profit that pose a real and immediate existential threat to humanity.

More exclusive content from this month’s print edition of Byline Times

The Betterment of Humanity?

First, AI has already made it so that it is impossible to be certain of what is real and what is artificially generated. There are free, publicly available tools that can create near-identical voice models from just 30 seconds of someone speaking, and image and video generators that will produce pictures and clips of anyone doing anything from a few sentences of text instruction. Very recently, the UK’s Electoral Commission acknowledged that the entire electoral roll, as well as all of its own email server systems, were hacked – with the data of millions of people taken. The immediate concern is that this data, possibly in the hands of a foreign government, could be used to target artificially-generated content – custom disinformation that misrepresents political parties and upends faith in the outcome of UK elections. AI, then, has brought the death of objective truth.

Second, generative AI can already do a number of high-skilled, high-paid jobs like accounting, advertising and statistical analysis, as well as humans can do. In one test case, it passed the American Bar exam to qualify as a lawyer.

The estimates of human replacement are staggering in both their scale and their speed. Goldman Sachs estimates that 300 million jobs could be replaced by AI, with two-thirds of roles in Europe and the US exposed to AI. The most impacted group is those earning more than £65,000 a year. 

The replacement is already happening, with the maximum impact possible in just the next 10 years. What happens when hundreds of millions of people are rapidly out of work? 

Tax receipts for governments fall and the state doesn’t have the resources to support the newly unemployed. Combine this with the rapidly escalating threat of climate change-induced migration and we are left with a perfect storm of chaos.

It was the economist John Maynard Keynes who predicted that we could, through technological advances, all be working a 15-hour week, with more time for leisure and intellectual pursuits that could further humanity. Instead, we have found technological advances have been primarily used to force greater productivity from humans themselves and consolidate wealth, capital and resources into the hands of fewer and fewer individuals.

Like so many industries before, we are seeing once more that it is less about the technology itself and more about the business model and economic system that underpins it. Its development is for profit, not for the betterment of humanity. 

Indeed, AI will likely welcome in the age of the trillionaire, with one individual person worth as much as the entire UK economy. 

We don’t have to look far to see the corrosive effects of an entire industry – Big Tech – being in the hands of a few near-monopolistic companies that are owned and run by equally few mega-worthy individuals and operated solely for the maximisation of profit. In fact, nearly all of the leading players in the AI space are the same firms. 

We have seen the corrosive effects of social media first-hand and almost exactly the same companies are in charge of this next revolution. There is still time to learn lessons before we reach the point of no return. This time, our very existence is on the line.


Byline Supplement is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Robert Ashman's avatar
🕷Alex Coppock-Bunce 🖐⚫️'s avatar
Ryan Stepp's avatar
Geoff Richards's avatar
Julian Friedmann's avatar
21 Likes∙
4 Restacks
21

Share this post

Byline Supplement
Byline Supplement
The Corrosive Effects of Social Media Must Warn Us About the AI Revolution Ahead
Copy link
Facebook
Email
Notes
More
4
Share
A guest post by
Kyle Taylor
Author, the Little Black Book series and Byline Times. Visiting fellow, Peace Centre, Tokyo, Japan.
Subscribe to Kyle

Discussion about this post

User's avatar
BREAKING CROSSPOST: Donald Trump Was Recruited by the KGB Under Codename ‘Krasnov’ Claims Former Soviet Spy Chief
Byline Times has crashed due to a DDOS attack and the original story blocked: a former senior KGB chief claims Trump was recruited by them in 1987 due…
Feb 21 • 
Nafeez Ahmed
 and 
Zarina Zabrisky
572

Share this post

Byline Supplement
Byline Supplement
BREAKING CROSSPOST: Donald Trump Was Recruited by the KGB Under Codename ‘Krasnov’ Claims Former Soviet Spy Chief
Copy link
Facebook
Email
Notes
More
3
Trump Isn't Joking About Lebensraum
Trump's plans for Greenland, the Panama Canal, Canada and Mexico aren't just idle talk. A senior US insider tells us what to expect
Feb 19 • 
Byline Supplement
560

Share this post

Byline Supplement
Byline Supplement
Trump Isn't Joking About Lebensraum
Copy link
Facebook
Email
Notes
More
4
Unmusked: How Elon Musk is Using Twitter to Destroy the Concept of Objective Truth
Heidi Siegmund Cuda reveals how Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter fits a disturbing global trend
Dec 11, 2022 • 
Heidi Cuda
 and 
Byline Supplement
121

Share this post

Byline Supplement
Byline Supplement
Unmusked: How Elon Musk is Using Twitter to Destroy the Concept of Objective Truth
Copy link
Facebook
Email
Notes
More
4

Ready for more?

© 2025 Byline Media Holdings Ltd
Privacy ∙ Terms ∙ Collection notice
Start writingGet the app
Substack is the home for great culture

Share

Copy link
Facebook
Email
Notes
More

Create your profile

User's avatar

Only paid subscribers can comment on this post

Already a paid subscriber? Sign in

Check your email

For your security, we need to re-authenticate you.

Click the link we sent to , or click here to sign in.