Individual benefits, societal harms?
Everyone has their own way of understanding and making sense of what’s happened since early 2023 when most people started paying attention to generative AI.
One way to think about it, or at least the effect it’s having, is that it’s a bit like self-checkout at the supermarket. Yes it’s convenient. Yes, I use it regularly. But overall? I’m not sure it’s a net positive for society.
Why do I use this analogy? Well beyond the obviously transactional nature of the whole edifice, it’s…
- A technological solution which reduces the amount of human labour required
- Increases the amount of overall surveillance in/of society
- Reduces the number of human interactions for marginalised and vulnerable people
- Makes it easier to process potentially embarrassing things
- Normalises disembodied voices saying nice things about you
You might think that the last one is a bit spurious, but I’d argue that it’s potentially the one with the biggest long-term impact. After all, if we end up living in a world where non-human machines are generally nice to us, but humans aren’t, I don’t think good things will happen as a result.
In fact, I can envisage us ending up in a version of the future depicted in the short, under-appreciated Bruce Willis film Surrogates. If you haven’t seen it, the film revolves around “a futuristic world where humans live in isolation and interact through surrogate robots.” The plot twist is predictable, but the future as imagined back 2009 is showing signs of peeking through in 2025.
The point I’m trying to make is that there are many things which have individual small benefits but are detrimental to the overall population. I remember reading one of Jared Diamond’s books—probably Collapse—in which he wondered what went through the mind of the person chopping down the last tree on a deforested island. I bet it had something to do with status, convenience, or self-preservation.
I’m not blaming anyone here; these individual decisions are explicable. What I think is inexplicable is governments’ unwillingness to act when there are documented negative impacts here and now. We don’t need to worry about AGI being (forever) “2-3 years away” when societal harms are being wreaked through AI being foisted onto a digitally-illiterate population.
Image CC BY-NC-ND cormac70