People are going to have to make themselves predictable, or the machines will get angry and kill them.
—Gregory Bateson
—Gregory Bateson
I’m walking here!
—Ratso Rizzo
You’re standing on a sidewalk adjacent to a busy street, and you’re late to your appointment that’s on the other side of the speeding traffic. You have a choice: you can hope for an opening through the multi-ton vehicles racing past, or you can walk to the end of the long urban block, push the walk button and wait for the traffic-light gods to smile on you.
Jaywalking laws came about in the late 1920s from a hard push by the auto industry. Before jaywalking laws, it was the automobile, not pedestrians, that had to be predictable.
Move fast and break things
—Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder
When Zuckerberg was clawing his company’s way to the top, his move fast and break things mantra served its purpose. So it is with budding (and perhaps soon to die) artificial intelligence (AI). Move fast because we’re in a race with China. Break things because only AI can fix the things it breaks. (No, I don’t understand that logic either, but if you say it fast enough…)
What a computer is to me is it’s the most remarkable tool that we’ve ever come up with, and it’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.
—Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs was defining the computer as a personal agency device. Funny, isn’t it, that a few years later, Jobs would introduce the bicycle lock for our minds, our minds locked to our iPhones that are locked to pernicious social media. The promise of increased personal agency, from the personal computer, then from the Web, then from the computer in our pocket, turned out to be a Trojan Horse.
While we thought we were becoming more productive and more entertained, we were being fed algorithms that produced regenerative feedback loops—what we call addictions—by the huge corporations that dominate our eyes and ears. And now that we’re off-balance, AI is coming to finish the job of killing off personal agency for good. It will be worthwhile, we’re told because we’ll have AI servants that will make us dinner reservations.
While I’m skeptical that, as some fear, artificial intelligence will get angry and kill us, literally, I believe the real threat is that AI will pacify us to the point of cultural suicide.
Big tech spends billions to just show us more ads for products, but who’s going to have money to buy these products when AI takes over the jobs of the middle class? I’m a little confused.
Notes
- I’m certain Steve Jobs would be disgusted by the exploitation from social media of the greatest communication device ever invented. Jobs had his faults, but crassness was not among them.