AIs Wide Shut

We have eyes but we choose not to see

Owl photo courtesy of Anonymous photographer via Pixabay; lattice graphic courtesy of Kabrea via CleanPNG

Do you know the password?

Good, you may enter. Do you know the password for the House?

I’m not sure… Is that a trick question?

Maybe.

There are still people in the world who have not heard about ChatGPT. Or Claude. Or Bard. Or AI in general. And quite frankly, my dear, they don’t give a damn. They’re trying to survive daily life, political oppression, wars, natural catastrophes, lack of access to water, food, health care, education, and often shelter.

Yet, if they are connected online, more than likely they—and the rest of us—are using some form of AI without realizing it. All it takes is a smart device and access to the internet. Most of us know the password for admittance, but we don’t know there is, in fact, no password for the House. And one day passwordless authentication might be an offer we won’t be able to refuse. AI is baked in—and the masks it wears are numerous and multivariate: social media, voice assistants, facial recognition, recommendation engines, smart thermostats. Anything to make modern life easier, smoother, less manual. Why walk across the room when you can simply exercise your vocal cords?

As a matter of principle, there is nothing wrong with making life easier. No reason to insist we continue to use manual typewriters instead of word processing programs (the frustration of having to retype an entire page because the typewriter ran out of correction tape is embedded in my middle school bones). No reason to scrub our fingers bloody when we have washing machines, walk or ride horses when we have cars, tend our own vegetable plots when we have grocery stores (or food delivery), spend three weeks on a ship when we can fly.

But the dinner party turns into a cult orgy when technology ceases to serve and support, and becomes its own end for profit and power.

The dark irony is that it’s the people with the least knowledge or awareness of AI who stand to negatively benefit the most from its ubiquity. Those struggling to survive in economies and political systems designed to stand on their backs forever. Those not actively fighting generative AI companies in court for IP theft because they don’t realize their non creative jobs are on the line too. The people who committed the crime of being born into the wrong half of humanity, skin color, or socioeconomic status. Our children whose careers haven’t yet been conceived, never mind prepared for.

Those of us with the privilege and luxury to discuss whether our chatbots are conscious, if AGI will kill us or keep us, or which artist’s style we’d like to mimic today, are all too aware of AI systems, but our eyes are so wide open we see less than those whose voices AI is suppressing.

We’re having the wrong conversation.