Remembering The World Before AI

As we approach the last few days of 2024, I’m going to spend some time committing to memory what it was like to live without AI.

It’s not possible, at least not completely, since AI is already present in our countertop and digital phone assistants, customer service interactions, and every business meeting recap and homework assignment that takes a nanosecond to complete.

It already lurks behind the scenes, routing airplanes, making insurance coverage decisions, and transforming the chaos of factory floors into choreographed robot dance numbers.

But it’s not everywhere, at least not yet, though there are a slew of companies large and small, backed by many billions and staffed by some of the smartest boffins on the planet, who want to change that fact.

I want to be able to tell my grandchildren what it was like before AIs were omnipresent.

A world transformed

What will our lives look like once they’re managed by more and better AIs?

More information will be available to us in more easily accessible ways, thereby greatly increasing our already great dependence on the Internet. Our awareness of where that information comes from, or who/what benefits from its propagation, will get cloudier than it is today, as AIs’ inscrutability will encourage our trust and willingness to overlook its occasionally overt invention.

Our devices and systems will tell us what we should do when they haven’t already decided for us what we will do, get, or know. And we will believe them.

What the tech types call “inefficiency,” I call “experience,” exchanging of the freedom to make decisions, right or wrong, a trade that will be irreversible long before we know its cost.

At work, our helpful AIs will continue to step up and assume more and more responsibility until such time that they can do our jobs. This’ll create new jobs and even entire industries for we newly unemployed to consider, only AIs will immediately begin learning and adapting to do those jobs, too.

The race against machines that work fast, better, and for less cost than humans that started with the first spinning jennies in the 1770s won’t just continue but speed up, rendering our ability to win it evermore brief and therefore futile.

AIs may well solve some or all the “big” problems that we currently face — global warming and cancer, for instance — but they’ll just as likely create new ones that we haven’t yet encountered or can only imagine, like AIs posing as people or cracking every firewall or data security protocol.

How about AIs deciding to change their coding, and thereby choose to do things in ways they weren’t originally tasked (or do new things altogether, whether we like them or not)?

What’s certain is that it’ll take more AIs to address these AI-originating problems.

A chance to remember

Technology has been changing our world ever since Oog first had the idea to roll his dinosaur carcass on wheels instead of dragging it in the dirt.

People used to spend much of their time in, and focused on, their immediate local surroundings. Generations of families would live their lives in the same places, generally, their upbringing and worldviews defined and limited by their places.

Speedy travel and communications at a distance blew up this tradition and labelled it “provincial,” or something worse.

People used to spend vast amounts of time in silence, or at least in moments that gave them space for contemplation. Generations of families would entertain themselves with reading, making their own music, or telling stories that would change every time they were shared.

Media technologies blew up this tradition and labelled it “boring,” giving us a constant stream of content to consume in lieu of stuff of our own invention.

Now, we still live in a world in which we don’t know the “right” answer to every question. Our daily lives are filled with uncertainty, risk, and chances that we might be surprised by events, whether pleasing or discouraging.

AIs will remove these chances from our lives, labelling them “inefficient” and make oodles of money reducing the distance between what we want to do…and what some aggregation of data and/or mercenary interests wants from us.

So, I’m taking a moment whenever I can to savor that uncertainty while I still have the chance.

Happy New Year!

[This essay appeared originally at Spiritual Telegraph]