(Authors note: This blog is in two parts for those who don't have a lot of time and/or patience. The first part is fairly short and deals specifically with the subject of practical ramifications of Artificial Intelligence, the second part gets into some related philosophical and ontological issues for those who have time, bandwidth, and appetite for that sort of thing.)
PART 1, Practical Ramifications of AI
Artificial intelligence is a relatively new technological development that is already having an enormous impact on the lives of nearly every human being walking this earth's surface, whether we like it or not, whether we understand it or not (almost no one does), and even whether we're aware of it or not.
Many people are confused, worried and even afraid of what is happening, and some are also angry about how all of these massive changes are happening (and accelerating) without ordinary people having any input into the process or control over it. Some people, like Judah Gabriel Himango (who kindly allows me to post blogs to this site,) are really excited about all the wonderful and amazing things AI will be used for that will make our lives so much better. But even Judah acknowledge that there's also some potential for AI to be misused and abused.
So, with that in mind, what are some of the potential downsides of AI?
At the extreme end is the scenario presented to us in the Terminator movies, where an AI supercomputer becomes self-aware, decides that humans are an obsolete waste of time and resources and decides to wipe us out, using the control it has over the weapons we built to protect ourselves to destroy us instead.
This scenario is not entirely implausible, but I don't think it's very likely, and even to the degree that it is possible, it is far from being the only thing we need to worry about.
The very existence of this technology means that a lot of things are going to change and although change has happened for thousands of years, for most of human history, it came at a fairly slow pace, so people had all the time they needed to adapt. A "lifetime" of change usually took an actual human lifetime, sometimes more than one. Now, a "lifetime" worth of change can happen in just a few years. For instance, I'm not quite 50 years old, but the circumstances that defined my childhood are VASTLY different from the circumstances that my own children are dealing with, for better and for worse.
On a related note, my sister-in-law is a teacher in the Israeli school system, and she recently attended a meeting with many other teachers in which they were told very straightforwardly that big changes are going to have to be made in the educational process because the curriculum that currently exists is completely inadequate to prepare students for the jobs that they will be trying to get when they finish school in a few years. Students who graduated from school in the last few years at the top of their class, with good grades and all kinds of honors and achievements, are unable to find work because none of the companies they're applying to need workers who have their skills and abilities. This is already a problem, and it's getting worse by the month.
For that matter, we've already seen large numbers of people losing their jobs because AI can do what they used to do faster, better, and above all, cheaper. Big companies are willing to spend lots of money for AI software that will allow them to stop paying salaries (often the largest expense a business has) because they think that will increase their profitability. The problem with that, obviously, is that their workers are also their consumers. If enough consumers don't have money to buy products and services being produced by these big companies anymore, they can save all the money they want on not paying salaries, but they still won't be profitable because they're not going to be bringing in any income.
The economy is a system of systems, with many moving parts, all interacting with each other in different ways. If you remove one of the major components of any system (in this case, consumers being removed from the economy) that system will start to break down, and eventually it will just completely stop functioning. It might be replaced by something else sooner or later, but it will still be a massive shock to everyone who was part of the system to begin with.
This is also important to understand for those of you who think that you'll be able to keep your job by learning how to make AI work for you. AI is VERY good at learning and evolving, and whatever you think you can do now that AI can't, it will probably be able to do it just fine before too much more time has passed.
But even if you DO manage to keep your job for awhile longer, if most of your neighbors DON'T keep their jobs, it's still going to cause all kinds of problems for you. Once again, the economy is a system of systems, with many moving parts. If some parts keep working the way they always did, that's all fine and good, but if other parts start to break down and stop working, it'll still cause problems even for the parts that still work.
To sum up part 1 of this blog, there is an observable historical pattern that there are always winners and losers any time civilization goes through a big change, whether it's brought on by changing weather patterns, some kind of political and/or cultural revolution, a big war and/or pandemic, or a technological breakthrough of some kind. Very few people know much about the losers of past seasons of change and VERY few people ever consider the possibility that they'll be one of the losers in whatever season of change they're currently in.
This is where the attitude comes from that can be summed up by the phrase "the world has always been falling apart, but we're still here".
Yeah, the collective human race is "still here" but literally billions of people who came before us, who were losers in the epochs they lived through, are not "still here," and even the memory of them has been largely erased. But what we do know about them is that they had a really bad experience and then they died.
My own personal opinion is that the season of change we're in right now, which is defined by changing weather patterns, political and cultural revolutions, and all the other things I mentioned before but above all by the technological revolution powered by AI, is going to produce far more losers than winners. I don't think it's wise for anyone to assume that they'll be one of the winners who are "still here" when it's over.
As a footnote, there's another possibility that I can see being very likely, and that is that the AI revolution will be held up for awhile by a factor that everyone seems to be forgetting about. AI data centers need an enormous amount of electricity to function, and the physical infrastructure that produces and distributes electricity in those parts of the world where AI data centers are being built is already in very poor shape. So the development of AI, and all the changes that AI is bringing to our lives, might be slowed down by this.
But it's still coming, and that's a fact we all have to deal with as best we can.
Part 2, Philosophical and Ontological Ramifications of AI
Everyone knows that gunpowder was invented in China. But "China" is a big place, and it's been around for a long time, and many things happened there before careful, written historical records were being kept, so there's some dispute among historians about exactly where, when, and how it happened.
There are also lots of folk stories, legends, fairy tales, etc., about it because, as the saying goes, success has a thousand fathers.
One of my favorite legends about how gunpowder was invented goes a little bit something like this.
In China, many years ago, there was a village on the side of a mountain, and in this village, most of the men worked all day in a silver mine so they could get silver to trade for food with the villages down in the plains, which had farms.
One day, a baby girl was born in this village. She already had an older brother, and her father and his younger brother both worked in the silver mine. Every morning, they would go to the mine together and come home together in the evening to eat supper with the family. It was a happy life, but one day, the younger brother came home from the mine by himself with a very sad look on his face, and he told the family that his brother had died that day in an accident at the mine.
This was very sad, but it was something that happened sometimes, so a few years passed, and then the little girl's older brother was ready to go to work in the mine. Every day, he went to work with his uncle and in the evening, they came home and had supper with the family. But one day, he came home alone with a sad expression on his face and told his mother and sister that his uncle had died that day in an accident in the mine. Once again, it was sad, but time passed and one day the little girl was not so little anymore, and she got married.
Her husband was a boy who had grown up with her in the village. They had known each other since they were children and she was very happy to be his wife. Every day, he went to work in the mine with her older brother and then came home in the evening to have supper with the family. But one day, her husband came home from work with a sad look on his face and told her that her brother had died that day in an accident in the mine. This was very sad for her, but soon she had good news to cheer her up because she gave birth to a beautiful little boy. He was the joy of her life and his father also loved him very much.
A few more years passed and every day her husband went to work in the mine with the other men of the village, but one day, the other men of the village came to her home at the end of the workday without her husband, and they had to tell her that he had died that day in an accident in the mine.
She sat down and cried and cried and cried, thinking about how bitterly unfair it was that her father, her uncle, her older brother, and now her husband had all lost their lives in accidents at this mine. Then she looked down at her son, playing in the sand outside their home and she realized that in just a few more years, he too would be old enough to go to work in the mine, and she would have to sit at home alone all day wondering if he would come home to her in the evening, or whether he would also die in an accident at the mine.
So, the next morning, she left her son with a neighbor and went to the mine with the men, which was a very unusual, almost unheard of, thing for a woman to do. When she got there, she asked to speak to the foreman, a man who had known her brother and her husband, and he reluctantly agreed to talk to her.
She asked him how and why so many men died in the mine, and he explained that it was very difficult work to dig for hours underground. The men got tired, and they started to get careless, and that's when accidents happened. He said that he and other foremen before him had tried many things to try and avoid accidents, but sooner or later, there would be another accident, and another, and another. He said it was something he wished he could do something about, but everything he could think of had already been tried.
So she went home and thought about what the foreman had told her, and she decided that she needed to find a way to make digging easier for the men so they wouldn't get tired and then they wouldn't get careless and start making mistakes that would lead to accidents.
So she went looking for answers to this problem, and she spent many days traveling to other villages to ask questions of people who knew different things about many subjects. After a few years, she began experimenting with different elements, and after many trials and much error, she thought she'd found a solution. So, on the first day that her son was old enough to go to work in the mine, she gave him a little jar filled with black powder and told him to give it to the foreman along with a little scroll on which she had written some instructions about how to use it, and also how to make more of the little black powder.
As she watched her son walking away towards his first day of work at the mine, carrying her little jar of black powder and the scroll with the instructions about how to use it, the little girl, who was actually an old woman by now, said to herself "I have saved my sons life, and I have also saved the lives of many more young men."
Now, obviously, this story isn't true, but it points us to a very important truth. Almost every technological development, invention, innovation, new process, etc. that has ever been dreamed up and built by anyone, was developed in order to solve some kind of problem. But MANY of these developments ended up being used for purposes that were not anticipated (or even imagined) by the people who did all the research and development to bring these things to the world.
My personal favorite example of this (which IS a true story) is the airplane, which, as everyone knows, was invented by Orville and Wilbur Wright and first flew at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on December 17, 1903. The Wright brothers were motivated to build machines that could allow humans to fly for a few different reasons, but the practical outcomes they envisioned for their invention were fairly limited. Orville Wright told one of his friends in 1902 that he thought it would be really amazing to have a way to deliver mail faster, and they also believed it might be used to bring medicine to remote communities in time to save the lives of people who would otherwise die if they had to wait for the medicine to be brought by someone in a wagon pulled by horses or other pack animals.
Certainly, those uses WERE made of machines that were based on the technology that Orville and Wilbur Wright developed. But there were many other uses made of such machines, and Orville Wright, who died in January of 1948, got to see how machines based on his invention were used to horrific effect in two world wars, including the massive destruction of entire cities in Europe and the Far East by carpet bombing raids which culminated in the nuclear bomb strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by B-29 bombers at end of WWII.
Now there's one more, much less dramatic but no less demonstrative, example I can cite of this phenomenon.
Bruce Springsteen, sometimes called the poet laureate of America's brutalized working class, wrote a song many years ago called "Born in the USA." He wrote this song as a protest against the mindless Jingoism which he believed (and I agree with him) had been exploited by America's societal elites to manipulate ordinary people into doing a lot of things that were not in their actual best interests.
But as the years have gone by, the song actually became the ANTHEM of mindless jingoism, often played at political rallies and other events that had the exact effect on the crowds that Springsteen was specifically trying to criticize with the song, and he has expressed great frustration at this, but there's nothing he can do about it.
The point here is that once an engineer presents their invention to the world, or an artist presents their song, or an author presents their book, or as soon as anyone releases whatever they've created into the world, they lose control over what happens with it. In my own experience, I've had total strangers come up to me at events where I was wearing a name tag and tell me that they read a blog I wrote and it changed their life, which is great. But most of the time, what they took away from the blog they read was a million miles away from what I was trying to say in that blog. It's a fact of life that I've made my peace with, but I never forget it when I'm writing and posting these blogs.
When it comes to AI, it's such a powerful tool. The only thing that can even be remotely compared to it is the internet, which was designed to simply be a reliable way for the US military to communicate globally, but it turned out to be something that was used by everyone, making some things better and many other things much worse, and also bringing all kinds of new good and bad things that no one ever even imagined would happen.
Think about the unintended consequences of the internet, how much it's changed all of our lives just in a few decades. AI is going to change much more, and the changes are going to happen much faster. Most people won't be able to keep up. The system of systems that we call the global economy, and beyond that, human civilization itself, probably won't be able to keep up.
Something is going to have to give, and it's likely going to happen before the end of this decade, so my advice to anyone who is reading this blog is to take care of any unfinished business you might have with God, your family, and your current circumstances as soon as you can.
That's what I've got for you this week. I hope it blessed someone.