Opinion: AI Over-Hyped
Despite the ever-present hype from tech companies, AI will do little to save a collapsing human civilization. Societal collapse demands the mobilization of material goods and resources to serve basic necessities such as food, shelter, and clothing. Equally as important, a sense of shared purpose must organically take root via high-trust interactions between those who occupy shared spaces in the real world. At best, AI can be subjugated to disseminating knowledge and recommending productive courses of action as we all navigate uncharted territory during these increasingly dark times, and AI’s future ubiquity will not be a pressing concern until mid-century.
The new landscape will require a symbiosis with AI that delineates clear boundaries for the practical applications of synthesized intelligence. While our current social media (Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and the like) may facilitate communication as a proxy or shadow of the coming “AI revolution”, those platforms offer little in the way of promoting human flourishing and may be antithetical to that end. (The popularity of such media stems from navel-gazing and the dead-end pursuit of empty dopamine hits.) However, consulting humanity’s collective knowledge to date (AI websearch summaries and YouTube tutorials, anyone?) — as well as re-tooling social media to coordinate the flow of essential resources — would be beneficial amidst a survival scenario.
Because the bonds that hold society together are based on relationships between humans, the dissolving of those bonds can be augmented but not fully restored by our technology. For the same reason that most of us desire to speak to a human representative in lieu of a machine, especially during those calls related to sensitive information, we are wired as highly social creatures that will not readily sacrifice trust for AI expediency. (Alas, tech companies have already made bank by perverting our social hardwiring to exploit our attention spans through the allure of “relationships” with “friends”, targeted advertising, and even, for the most vulnerable, entire worldviews.) Consequently, we are set to see a reversal of the Bowling Alone mentality.
As this crisis period deepens, authentic relationships and new community-organizing efforts will coalesce around places-of-being that are inherently more trustworthy than digital ones, such as neighborhoods, workplaces, and churches. The American social fabric will regenerate from the people, from the ground up, while simultaneously being guided by AI course-charting from the top-down. The intersection of these two forces is the great unknown of the current era. Will we awake from the spiritual slumber that befell America twenty years ago and see civic institutions revived, and will that revival see a hard delineation between man and machine-learning? Our leaders would be wise to respond to popular sentiment, which will increasingly become anti-tech.
The current outlook is grim and will bring out the best and worst of our humanity. AI should be used as a tool to promote social regrowth and to teach us better resourcefulness and governance. As (God willing) society is reconstructed beyond the crisis period, our leaders will be charged with creating the box inside which AI will find its limits. Perhaps a couple decades will pass, and the young people — as young people often do — will question everything and lead us into another awakening. If civilization survives to that point, the awakening will take AI out of the box and explore its ability to explore us and our sentience, but we need not worry about that amid the current cultural moment that will reach a conclusion around 2030.
Photo Credit: https://www.lummi.ai/photo/futuristic-data-visual-dbmlu