Explosive accelerations in the development and dispersal of Artificial Intelligence (AI) software are destabilizing millennia of human experience, practice, and shared reality, right now.
Thousands of hyperbolic articles and videos careen through the web every hour, signaling dangers to civilization – structural, biological, economic, intellectual, educational. Dangers reach all the way into unreliable authorship and speech – imperiling the foundations of freedom – and even into stolen creative works.
One great benefit to the furor, for me, is the reactive explosion in conversation and commentary about the value of humanity, the values held within humanity, the essence and spirit of human life (represented by the blue butterfly above). These cri-de-coeur reactions are coming through the philosophical and meditative channels I’ve curated into my electronic inbox (irony noted). A key piece of jargon among them is “the alignment problem”: the challenge of how to align AI with human values.
I’ve been both charmed and alarmed, in online interactions, by the suddenness of realization among so many who’d not understood what’s been happening for decades. Maybe I was more alert because I’d enjoyed an exciting identity, in the 1980s, as a graduate student investigating these new world-changing technologies. In recent conversations, many participants clearly hadn’t been reading about AI capabilities and potentials. Many hadn’t even entertained the speculative-fictional versions (e.g, Klara and the Sun, The Candy House, Ventus, Edge of Dark and Spear of Light).
I was less surprised, having read both for years, with plenty of time to be startled, time to process the emotions rising up from this existential threat. Still, I was jolted to hear a Zen monk mention Terminator 2: Judgment Day as a reference point for discussion, to hear a brilliant professor of cognitive science and Socratic studies refer to the movie Her as a possible scenario for Artificial General Intelligence (AGI, able to learn and perform and create, autonomously, across disciplines).
The title of this piece refers to an earlier “Before Times” – a term that’s made sense to me in reference to life before covid, lockdowns, and ubi-Zoom. Our cultural surround, our context for living, and thus our reactions and responses to the world, have felt different in recent years.
This time, it’s AI, poured almost silently into public life through social media and other outlets for decades. Now it represents another, more fundamental shift, kicked into high gear by a race to deploy, to the public, a human-pantomiming language-model kind of AI called GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer – “generative” meaning it makes stuff up, first by hit-or-miss probability algorithms and then by inexplicable hallucinations). Applications are infinitely malleable, so the potential for harm, to self and others, is skyrocketing along with the tech’s productive uses. Now that people can get their hands on such erratic powers, life in general and communications in particular are becoming less and less reliable.
My choices feel limited. I can find ways to support those who are trying to make it all safer. I can keep focusing on developing my uniquely human capacities, with all the moral force and aspiration I can summon, and join others aspiring to wisdom and ethical response. I can keep up with the news so that I’ll bring valid info to any conversation (irony noted again). I can keep listening for insight and inspiration about how to upgrade my own speculative work-in-progress, hoping I can contribute artistically to real-world outcomes attuned to the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.
I expect the intense, vivid, complex stories about AI will keep exploding for a while – some of them genuine alerts and some of them marketing grabs for sales of goods and services. Still, I’m glad I’ve marked this time here, this new “Before,” while the nature of shared reality seems to be disassembling.
Photo Credit: Erik Karitz via Unsplash