The world you were born in no longer exists.
When I was a child, thousands of years ago, the world was still mostly analog.
I listened to vinyl records and tapes.
I had a walkman. That was considered a great innovation back then.
Sometimes the tape got stuck and you needed to rewind it with a pen.
We had rotary phones at home. We used pay phones when we needed to call someone if we were outside.
We took pictures with film cameras that you had to take to the lab to see how they came out. We did not have social media, so we could just show the photos to family or close friends. Nobody else saw them.
I had the privilege of shooting short movies with a 35 mm camera, and working with film projectors.
I still love the sound of film rolling.
The first computer I had, you had to load the game by playing a tape.
That had an interesting sound too.
The second computer I had, you had green letters on a black screen, and no Windows.
Today, all that is gone, of course.
Social media, smartphones and now AI have changed things.
But is it good?
First of all, I would like to make one thing clear. Artificial Intelligence is a misnomer. There is no intelligence involved. Certainly no conscience or volition. I think automation is a better term.
In some ways, automation will make things easier. But in other ways, it will make things more complicated.
Of course it will also end with a lot of jobs, especially for people in the low end of the curve.
It’s interesting that at the same time that they develop AI, they are bringing in a lot of uneducated migrants for jobs they will no longer have.
Or will they? Some jobs still cannot be made by automation, or it’s cheaper to hire people at very low costs.
One effect it will have, I think, is that most people will no longer know how to write properly. It will do for writing what calculators did for math. You need a letter or a paper for school? Let ChatGPT do it.
Now, I don’t think that’s a very big problem, because most people can’t write anyway. Before, students would copy from encyclopedias or from each other, now they use ChatGPT. Garbage in, garbage out.
I think the real problem, and you see that already, is a huge proliferation of bad-quality writing. Lots of people who, not knowing how to write, try to create an essay or even a novel using one of those automated systems.
Lots of things on the Internet are already texts written by bots. It’s possible that a lot of journalism will be replaced by AI, if it isn’t already. There’s not a lot of skill involved in writing news.
The same goes for AI art. It’s proliferating everywhere. I don’t think it’s good.
But I think one good effect of AI art is that it also creates a backlash. It is bringing back people interested in the traditional arts. I recently started oil painting, and there are quite a lot of interesting videos right now about classic painting, and lots of people interested in them.
One of the things I liked about the recent Beetlejuice sequel was that most of the effects were practical. Masks, puppets, even stop-motion.
I think a lot of people enjoyed that.
But back to the topic. I think that the real main problem with automation is that it will most likely lead to a new form of autocratic government.
Technologies such as facial recognition will be able to track you and pinpoint you everywhere.
With digital cash, they will be able to see everything you spend, and freeze your accounts if such is needed.
Other technologies will track everything you do, write or even think.
It’s simply inevitable. There are already cars that, while not yet fully automated, won’t allow you to go above the road’s speed limit. If you do so, it will automatically send your data and location to the nearest police station.
Technology does many things, some good, some bad, but in general it does not lead to greater freedom. Most people were freer when they lived in the countryside or in the middle ages.
It’s not a coincidence that most dystopias, such as 1984 or Brave New World, involved some form of technological control.
But things are what they are. I’m not sure you can put the technological genie back in the bottle.
As, for me, sometimes I think, what would have happened if technology had simply frozen to what we had in the 1980s or 1990s? Would that be so bad? Is life so much better today than it was back then? Are we happier? Are we more productive?
I don’t know. My own impression is that life was better in the 1990s. But it could be just nostalgia.