The lights and outlets in certain rooms would blink on and off. Being an old house in which the previous owner and a few before him had died, I assumed that the place was haunted. Then the blinking became more frequent and lasted longer until the day these “haunted” circuits stayed off. At this point, I could no longer afford my assumption that the selective paralysis of my home’s nervous system was the work of a ghost and went in search of the cause.
First I opened the panel and checked the circuit breakers. All in order. Next I checked the GFCI (ground-fault circuit interrupter) outlets to see if any those needed a reset. All good. I turned to the internet, that vast repository of knowledge which has replaced the library, to see what solution an AI bot could extract from the digital plenum. The AI bot instantly suggested—wait for the trumpeters of our artificial El Dorado—nothing more than I had already tried.
Of course I excused this as I excuse all technology—by reminding myself that it’s still in its infancy. For I knew that a clutch of post-pubescent programmers in Silicon Valley were coding hard to fix the suckage, as their two-mil San Francisco condos were at stake. But knowing that could take a couple of decades and several age-adjusted staff purges—younger is better in tech—I had to do something that I am inclined to avoid: ask a real person for help.
Fortunately, I had a close friend who was an electrician, so I gave him a call and described the problem. Based on what I told him, he speculated that it might be the main breaker. Later that day, he showed up and went straight to the main breaker panel, opened it up and touched the wires with his voltage gizmo and said, “It’s the main. Half your current is out. Probably the switch.” He pulled the switch out and bingo: the switch’s connectors were corroded, not haunted.
This experience confirmed something that I’ve suspected since digital technology has been trying to automate humans: the new nerd Utopia is more about incapacitating humans than it is about capacitating machines. Big tech is analogous to big pharma, and Meta AI, ChatGPT and Gemini are the latest pain killers, beta blockers and benzodiazepines designed to suppress our need to learn by practice. Because praxis is heuristic, takes place in three dimensions, is sometimes painful and sometimes involves the necessary discomfort of communicating with other human beings.
Despite the tech industry’s drive to maximize everything—to consume more plastic, more precious metals and more electrical energy so that more users can merge more seamlessly with more metaverse—AI will forever be in its quantitative infancy. It will never simulate the complex interplay of consciousness, sensory perception and spatial existence that nature has endowed mortals who merge with and emerge from other mortals.
The current state of the large language model (LLM) tells us that, so far, AI can barely replicate two tiny functions of the human brain: storage and retrieval. Will AI suddenly evolve from that to making the sensory, cognitive and emotional decisions that humans make? Will it suddenly imagine how words sound to an audience or factor the sensory associations of words into its retrieval function? Probably not. Because “Max flipped the medium-rare burger onto a bun” will never mean anything to an AI.
That nothing means anything to a machine is nothing new. An LLM selects words based on a statistical model that assesses the mathematical likelihood that one word will follow another. That is why AI writing is inherently normative compared to human writing. It doesn’t write as humans do—with an intention to communicate human experience to other humans—but selects words based on the probability of their occurrence, which results in a paucity of meaningful expression that’s easy to identify.
This disappointing writing in itself debunks the media-induced fear that AI will become conscious. We, the conscious ones, still do not know what consciousness is or how it works. We do not even know whether it is a general entity or one that temporarily abides in the individual. We only know that consciousness is organic and AI is inorganic (”artificial”), and no multi-billion-dollar executive bonus will bring us closer to artificially replicating an organic entity that we do not understand.
Believing that AI will one day attain consciousness is like believing that a mirror will come alive when you gaze into it. It’s called “projecting sentience onto complex but fundamentally mindless systems,” as Dr. Simon Duan put it in a Scientific American article on AI and consciousness. Dr. Duan, the founder and CEO of Metacomputics Labs, thinks that the real risk of AI is that it will mirror human evils: “The fear of conscious AIs rebelling becomes less plausible unless humans deliberately engineer them to do so. Instead, the primary ethical challenge now becomes: How do we face the fragments of ourselves we encounter in these digital mirrors?”
For three-quarters of a century we have lived with the atomic bomb. At this point, the world has stockpiled a nuclear arsenal sufficient to destroy Earth 55 times. Like AI, nuclear weapons have no consciousness. The first and last use of the atom bomb was to kill humans on the islands of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. The two bombs killed an estimated 150,000 civilians instantly and another 100,000 gradually. After that, nuclear weaponry was judged to be a threat to human existence in toto (a literal existential threat) and has not been used for anything since but what the military refers to as a “deterrent.”
AI has already been weaponized. Russia and China use it to engage in psychological warfare, or what China calls “cognitive domain operations.” Mental as it sounds, these operations have material and detrimental effects. They sowed discord among Americans and helped to install a narcissistic megalomaniac as president. In effect they turned the tide of American global dominance. But the magnitude of the effect only proves that AI can be a useful tool to politically disrupt adversarial nations. It shows that, like any tool, it simply extends the will of its user.
Humans are the deciding factor in how AI will impact society. Commandeered by nerd oligarchs who have no reason to care about the bifurcation of humanity into realms of bliss and blight, the effect will be an age of fakery and the subordination of human excellence to human dumbness. In the hands of criminals, the effect will be fraud. In the hands of politicians, the effect will be war. In the hands of the ordinary humans, it will be the decline of their cognitive abilities and skills gained by experience.
I do not profess to being better at the future than anyone else is. But considering reactions to past industrial revolutions, wars and power shifts, I cannot preclude a possible revolt. Most dystopian visions are a projection of current trends based on prior trends. They usually exaggerate and distill these trends. But I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that if AI-generated media is vapid now, it will be more vapid when it is mass produced. The question is, will people be so seduced by AI’s formulaic pap that they will cease to want anything authentic and true?
Dystopias in which control is maintained by media or drugs designed to stimulate dopamine release are not new. From Kallocain to Brave New World to Infinite Jest, these dystopias warn of a world controlled via our neurological susceptibilities. But these distilled fictional worlds do not account for the randomness of the real world. In the real world, inundating society with AI pap will not simply go unopposed. It will likely increase the demand for originality and works that express experiential truths. The Renaissance came out of the Black Death, the Enlightenment out of The Thirty Years’ War, Romanticism out of the Industrial Revolution, Modernism out of WWI and the sixties counterculture out the Vietnam War. If the historical pattern plays out, a counterculture could revolt against big tech’s stratifying and damaging influence. Newton’s Third Law of Motion could apply to the social sphere, whereby the actions of big tech produce equal and opposite reactions by those harmed.