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
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.
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.
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.
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