The Water is HOT, Can You feel the Burn? (a musing on A.I.)

First Things First

Right out the gate, let’s be clear. This essay is not arguing for or against AI technology, nor does it go in depth about the benefits and harms it could cause society or humanity. What it does is critique the way the technology is being developed and how it’s being deployed; explores how the magnitude of AI's disruptive nature has brought to light more clearly, for me, the systemic issues in our political and socioeconomic systems which are long overdue for an upgrade; and advocates for upgrading our political system’s Operating System to one that can effectively handle the new technology, before it’s too late.

​People scraping the internet for text and images for AI without asking permission makes me feel: (1) naive for sharing my work publicly and carelessly across social media platforms; and (2) taken advantage of. Just like when I take responsibility for putting myself in a vulnerable situation—walking home at night in a bad neighborhood—doesn’t make a person that mugs me innocent or justified; when someone admits they were naive about what they were signing away in privacy policies, does not mean what the AI tech companies did was ethical.

It's the Same, But Different

That it has happened before (technological innovations shaking up society), and we have always adapted is not a good enough argument for why we should sit this one out and allow the tech moguls to force feed us a new way of living that we didn't have a hand in creating, except in the most literal sense of being the input to the algorithm, and inadvertently in our own passivity and acquiescence.
 
It has indeed happened before, very recently in fact, with the advent of social media, and look how that turned out. We haven't even caught up with the fallout from it--the biases, the rabbit holes leading to polarization, the impact on self-esteem, the algorithms that make people twist and contort themselves just to keep getting views. When the whole point of it, supposedly, was to share art, messages and connect with others. But we weren’t the social media company's customers, the advertisers were, which creates a trade system that lacks transparency on what is being bought and sold; in other words, a system primed for injustice. Add in the stockholders for these publicly traded tech companies and you’ve got all kinds of misaligned incentives and competing needs.
 
And it’s these same tech companies who aren’t being direct and honest about their motives or respecting people enough to ask permission (#me too movement anyone?) that are pervading every aspect of people's lives and no one seems to think there's anything dangerous about that.

​It’s like the “boiling frog” metaphor.

​I too have been guilty of being blind. But not anymore. 

Of course technological developments are always creating disruptions that takes people’s jobs, but the concern is that it hasn’t ever happened on this potential scale or speed. A question we might want to ask ourselves, is this:

Is this inevitable, is this the only way to move forward as a culture, as a society, as an evolving species, or is this just an arbitrary decision by some small subset of industry trying to maximize profit? Is there another way?

The Futility of Technology

Interestingly, the extreme disruptive nature of this new technology has prompted existential questions that reveal, not the greatness of technology, but its futility. We all know that people on their death beds don't regret not watching more YouTube videos or not working more and making more money, but rather not spending time connecting with their loved ones. And I'll bet money that AI taking over jobs will not lead to more fulfillment or more free time to spend with loved ones. Has any other recent invention, outside of healthcare that can extend lives, really given us more "free time?"
 
What people want is to feel good on a deep visceral level. People want real connection and they also want to work and have purpose. The priority isn't to do away with jobs but to compensate people fairly for their work, create meaningful opportunities for growth, and ideally set children up from a young age to figure out what kind of work will be most suited to them individually, so they are more likely to excel and become active contributing members of society.
 
There’s nothing wrong with shaking up the economy with a new invention, but at the very least, why not do it in a way that helps people prepare for it first, rather than blindly playing race to the market games? These are people’s lives we are talking about.

​These companies are in such a hurry toward this illusion of “technological progress” that they don’t mind leaving the majority of the human race in the dust. It is important to be able to adapt to change, but more people should have a voice in what the change is. Perhaps the really smart and adaptive thing to do is to start questioning the direction we are going.
 
Where are we trying to go anyways? Is this direction inevitable? Or is it just an arbitrary decision by a few giant companies playing around with their toys, trying to corner the market, to maximize profit without concern for the whole. It feels reminiscent of the days when industry was allowed to throw toxic waste in rivers and it’s being done right under our noses.

The Ends Don't Justify the Means and They Never Have

It's a great disservice to society that "whether the ends justify the means" is framed as something that’s up for debate. Based on simple logic, if you have to violate the principle/values/vision of the ends to get there, you will never actually get there. Whatever “there” is, it will be corrupted by the means.  

What these people behind ChatGPT and MidJourney did—how they did it—is not ethical, just as wrong as the way social media companies sell people’s data and lack transparency in their algorithms is unethical. With A.I., instead of claiming the effort was to connect people more quickly to things they want, they veiled it under the guise of a nonprofit collecting information to better humankind (which by the way they've since re-negged on and converted towards for-profit). But we all know, no matter what the benefits are--there are always some benefits--in the end, it’s likely going to perpetuate the same injustices and contribute to existing economic disparities favoriting those in power. 

For us to put our foot down, is it not enough to know that the people behind this technology are not taking proper safeguards?  Why is it not a crime for them to have done what they have done? The companies behind this technology are not looking out for the people, not enough. If they did, they would have asked “the people” permission to do this. If they did, they would be taking incredible measures to make sure there are laws and policies in place to protect the public before deploying their new AI toys.

If we, the people, don’t rally together and do something, we are setting a dangerous new precedent about how willing we are to take things lying down while some small subset of techies and business people direct the entire lifestyle of the country. They’re asking, “Can we do it, and how much can we make?” when they should be asking, “Should we do it, and how will it impact humanity?” They’re racing at breakneck speed to implement their vision of the future based on motives of curiosity and profit rather than heart and soul. That does not sound like a recipe for the benefit of humankind.

And since the code behind AI is programmed by humans, the unconscious biases people who have not been thoroughly vetted, are going to be mirrored in this technology. If a huge ethics committee isn't involved in the AI's creation every step of the way, how good do you think it's going to turn out? Think about it. And don't get me started on the transparency of the data going into the system—how do you even quality control that?

But even if they had built the model ethically and transparently, there's still the problem with the careless way they’re rolling the products out, which is incredibly dangerous to do without proper regulatory protocols in place to protect the massive amounts of disinformation and scams that will inevitably result—and those are just the most easily foreseeable issues.

“But that’s capitalism for you,” I used to say. No. Not this time. Not this way. Not this small subset of bullying, old school paradigm tech giants dictating the direction of humanity.

This could become a runaway train fast. Europe is already ahead of the U.S. in policy setting, as usual. Will we keep pace? We still haven’t addressed the massive corruption and immoral practices behind social media and the selling of people's data, algorithmic biases, etc. We haven’t even addressed the root of the housing bubble crisis of 2009 for that matter.

If nothing else, this is too much too quickly without the proper protocols and safety measures. It’s a negligence by a bunch of curious tech folks asking can we? not should we? Asking how much money? not how much meaningful benefit to mankind?

It’s too much to bear.  This has gone too far. Enough is enough.

Root Cause Solution?

​The only solution I see is to go directly to the deeper level of the issue, namely, cleaning up they way in which money influences politics, such as campaign financing. Good old Bernie Sanders opened my eyes to this one. The government is working far too much for big business and not for the people and it’s only getting worse every day we don’t do something about it.
 
I know, companies are just made up of people. But you see, when they get big enough, the sum total is greater than its parts and takes on a life of its own (oh, hey, kind of like emergent AI.) And with competing incentives—customers, stockholders, employees, owners—things get mucky very fast.
 
Without government oversight, rivers and air get polluted, companies pay poverty wages, monopolies get created, mortgage-backed securities cause a housing crisis, and the American people get raped by Big Tech. We need a government that works for us, where the people in Congress setting the laws are no longer beholden to the corporations that fund their election and are free to reflect the needs of the individual people they represent.

So how do we change this? 

​It's simple. We speak in the language they understand, our pocketbooks, and demand that corporate money be taken out of politics, arguably the most important thing to separate from politics since religion.

​The very foundations of our democracy support this kind of movement to get us back on track where the country is for the people by the people, not for the corporations by the corporations. Big business pays a tiny fraction of the taxes individuals do, but influence policy orders of magnitude more. We need to make changes that allow for our voices to  be represented fairly. We need to realign the values of this country with the sentiment of democracy it was built on.

​And there's no time to lose, because it's very possible that with A.I., at some point this kind of protest may no longer be possible. We could have put our foot down last time, and we didn’t.
 
If Americans came together on this bipartisan issue, demanding reform in campaign financing so that politicians are no longer so indebted to big business, we could really start to push the needle towards a better world. 

Conversely, if we don’t do anything, we are letting it happen. That’s it. On some level, we are part of the problem if we are not part of the solution. 

Of course, as I mentioned before, it's not AI itself that’s the problem. It’s the way it was created in isolation without approval, and the way it is now being deployed without care for the people, for the children, for the future of mankind. If there isn’t a Dalai Lama level conscience in the board meetings with these companies, they are doing it wrong. This stuff is potent, and they are being negligent. At least with the atom bomb we had enough sense to keep it tightly regulated.

OR ARE WE ALL TOO COMFORTABLY NUMB?

And yet....

It's understandable why it’s hard to see things clearly. On some level this is nothing new. This is just a symptom of an issue that's always existed; but we can see the widening gap of poor and rich in our country. That should be indicator enough that something is wrong; that while technological developments are surely moving the needle in areas such as medicine and research—extending people’s lives—they are not necessarily leading to greater wellbeing and enjoyment while alive. There is another step we need to take, that’s better for everyone involved, even business, in the long term.

That humans haven’t even mastered their own selves before creating AI is a phenomenal irony. That so much energy and money is directed towards technology when more and more young people are killing themselves, ostensibly as a result of this very technology, says something is really off with the priorities here. So much more beauty would come from a shift in focus to early childhood education, mindfulness, to learning how to be in our bodies, how to learn how to listen to ourselves and own longings and wishes, not the things people are telling us to long for and wish for. But a bunch of free thinkers with that much agency and aspiration running around isn’t necessarily in the interest of those already in power.

The silver lining in all this is that the monstrosity of the violation and rape that just happened is opening people's eyes to how deep this corruption goes – just how much our own brothers will sell us out for a quick buck. The selling of our data was the most recent violation and I didn’t understand it at the time. I feel ashamed about not speaking up about it, but now, with the release of AI in such a haphazard way, I see. Now I can feel it. 

The water is f*&$ing hot!

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For More Reading:

• The A.I. Dilemma - by Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin from the Center of Humane Technology, introduced by Apple CEO Wozniak
• A.I. Revolution  - 60 Minutes interview with Google developer
• A.I. Meets Hollywood -  Entertainment lawyer speaks on implications for screenwriters
• Emotional Intelligence in the Age of AI - Daniel Goleman, PhD
• How Will Artificial Intelligence Change Higher Ed? - The Chronicle
• How One Screenwriter finds AI Useful (and Useless) - The Generator / Op Ed
• There is no A.I. -  New Yorker Opinion Piece
• A.I. and the Silicon Valley - Business Insider
• A.I. Creativity, Neuroscience and the Future of Work - Substack blog Article
• A Tireless Unoriginal Plagiarist Who Will Work for Free, A Tutored Parrot - Deadline article by Bohemian Rhapsody Screen Writer
• The End of Art: An Argument against Image AI - Youtube channel
• It Will Think of Something - Boston Globe Cartoon