The Greek word Utopia was brought into common English usage
By Sir Thomas Moore
His 16th century book of the same name
Described an idyllic island of equality
A society run for the benefit of is citizens
Utopia means literally “no place.”
From there it was a hop, skip, and a jump
To the word dystopia
How do we know when we are living in a utopia vs. a dystopia?
Can we agree that a minimum quality of any society
Never mind a utopia
Has to be that it is run for the benefit of its inhabitants?
Anyone feel like they live in a society that is run for their benefit?
If our society is not for its people
Then what is it for?
What is the point?
Joseph Schumpeter was an early 20th century political economist
He is responsible for the concept of the entrepreneur
He also popularized the concept of “creative destruction”
That new ideas would lead to the destruction of the old ways of doing things
and that it was the driver of growth in an economy
That capitalism was an evolutionary process
However, he also believed the capitalism would eventually collapse
Weakened by the very things that pushed it forward
Ending in corporatism run by elites
How do we know when we are living in a utopia vs. a dystopia?
If something is bad for people working in an economy
But good for the economy
What is the point?
Who is the economy for?
In the middle of the 20th century, mathematician and, considered by many, the inventor of the modern computer, Alan Turing, proposed the imitation game
More commonly known as the Turing test
The imitation game was a test for a machine
to fool a human
into thinking that the machine
was human
We are in the midst of the great AI revolution
With its promise of freedom from drudgery,
and a new generation of tools and productivity
However, art was first
Art the refuge
Art the joy bringer
Art the context giver
Whose drudgery and productivity is this AI revolution for the benefit of?
How do we know when we are living in a utopia vs. a dystopia?
Technological improvements that don’t bring improvements
but just destruction of the things that we most value
What is the point?
There is a surprising lack of reverse Turing tests in this AI revolution
A test to separate what is machine regurgitated rather than human created
The lack of footnotes with generative AI
would seem to be useful addition for a “tool”
Stimmed by over protection of algorithmic secrets
Or perhaps potential evidence in copyright infringement lawsuits
And then there is the insistence on the marketing friendly term “A.I”
Rather than the more accurate machine learning
Machine learning is what humans have previously created
Scraped from the internet
Stuffed into a blender
And output to decent summarization engines
and lukewarm guessing machines
without a thought to copyright and intellectual property
We will sleepwalk into AI invading the workplace
Learning from us
Getting better because of us
Replacing us because it is cheaper
But eventually failing because of a lack of new data
We are the Ouroboros
The snake eating its own tale
From the ancient Egyptian “Enigmatic Book of the Netherworld”
From the tomb of Tutankhamun
A funerial text of prescience
From a people long gone
How do we know when we are living in a utopia vs. a dystopia?
Sam Altman, is the CEO of OpenAI,
originally a non-profit focused on AI safety
But now a for profit company, that is most widely known for ChatGPT,
And the internal infighting over the lies and riches of temptation
Altman has said multiple times onstage and in his own blog
“AI will most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there will be great companies created with serious machine learning.”
When Michael Crichton wrote “your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”
He was talking about bringing dinosaurs back from the dead, not making poor people poorer and rich people richer.
Tech Bros can’t even make a printer that works
What is the point?
The Artificial Intelligence apocalypse
Will not be killer robots who look like Arnold
(a lot less of those kinds of movies of late for those not paying attention)
The Infopocalypse will be algorithmically incoherent
An internet of machines talking to machines
Manipulating and obfuscating to the highest bidder
“Alexa, “should I leave my wife”
Answered by averages and random chance
The opinion of machines more important than the opinions people
The death of the internet as a tool is probably already here
With Reddit the default result on Google for almost everything
Since when did Reddit become the arbiter of truth?
How do we know when we are living in a utopia vs. a dystopia?
According to Greek myth
When Pandora opened a box in the care of her husband
All the evils of the world were released
Slamming it shut too late she trapped hope in the box
We live in a world of technologies that are artificially limited
Or forced into failure
For the benefit of “society” rather than the people in that society
Copyright only seems to matter to those who can punch downwards
Your iPhone can’t have a headphone jack
So we can sell you Bluetooth headphones for hundreds of dollars
Our books, movies, and music are not owned
But at the whims of a subscription model and changing licensing agreements
Cloud based document sharing to put paid to paper
And those pesky printers
Selling ink that costs more than the printer was just not quite good enough
The promise of lies
The lies of promise
What is the point?
If we can limit and implement technology for benefit of corporations, billionaires, and the status quo it can be limited and implemented for people
Are we in a pot of slowly boiling water?
The fable goes, that a frog will jump out if placed in a pot of boiling water
But will be slowly cooked alive if placed in cool water that is incrementally heated
However, what actually happens if you place a frog into boiling water, is that it dies
And if you place a frog into cool water, it jumps out because it can
Can we jump out of the pot, or have we already been dumped into the boiling water?
Not using AI will require the courage of our convictions
That being creative does not always have to be destructive
That moving fast and breaking things just leads to broken things
That societies should be for the benefit of all the people inside them
And that we all get to decide what the point is
Do we live in a utopia or a dystopia?
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