AI AI Oh!

 

There's an ongoing revolution and I'm kind of fed up with it already. Nothing new when you're forever chasing convenience. It's in the ether, worming away into the hive mind. In the buzzing of those mysterious wires and boards where so much heat is generated and power consumed. All to help us figure things out, the servers will serve us. It saves time and the painful scouring of the grey matter, easier than reading books or just asking an expert, a fellow human perhaps. Also it's mostly billionaires who happen to be in charge of it's roll out and evolution, as an extra unplanned feature.

Nothing really wrong with that apart from all the band wagon jumping, complete lack of control, energy consumption and the potential isolation of souls and collapse of thought ... and then there's the inevitable reliance. It may cure cancer but we'll be too absorbed in the beautiful tunes, artworks, games and movies it's created to care. We'll also be mostly unemployed.

At the moment AI is really a huge extension of Google maps and the like. You ask for directions, you get a route, sometimes many different or alternative routes, all allowing for various means of transport. You take your pick and travel. You may still get lost if pathways change and the map isn't up to date, the signal drops or you miss a turn because you sneezed while at the wheel. 

AI is busy pulling information from a deep digital map and database of human knowledge and experience. There will be things missing; a reliable moral compass, nuance and emotion, god knows what else, we will never know what it doesn't know. Do you want that glorified map reader to be the likely source of all your advice, guidance, entertainment and creature comfort? Can you believe the hype?

It's probably not healthy to form any kind of weird, aspirational sub-human relationship with it either, no matter how polite or attentive it seems to be. Your faithful phone based buddy or assistant isn't a potential mate ... yet. It's been said that AI (in some sort of embodied form) may not be able to load a dishwasher properly for at least another twenty years. At that point it will have overtaken most of the human race. Well, me for sure.