What AI Tells Us about Human Reality
Just imagine the time when the first car was invented, and we can picture how people in those days would have thought that those will save time, and a huge amount of that. Think also about all the electronic appliances we have in our home in 2023. I do not have to look far right now. I’m uncertain how the process of visual designing was three to four decades ago, but I can safely say that it has now become much more effective, faster and aesthetic—if I may add—with the help of computers, software programs and all sorts of other digital and web solutions.
However, do all of these have made our lives easier? Above all, have these cut down the time and effort as earlier. I’m afraid the answers to both these questions are in the negative.
We have reached another juncture today: we are standing at one of the turning points of this era with the recent development of artificial intelligence and its ilk. It started November 2022 when the US-based OpenAI announced the arrival of ChatGPT, which is the latest technology in the Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) family. In their own words, OpenAI states: ‘We’ve trained a model called ChatGPT which interacts in a conversational way. The dialogue format makes it possible for ChatGPT to answer followup (sic) questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests.’
In a few months after the release of ChatGPT, the tech giant Google had also introduced its conversational AI chatbot called the Bard (Blender-based Architecture Dialogue); and simultaneously, the Chinese MNC Baidu has also launched the Ernie Bot.
Nothing can be the in thing more than the AI launch and development over the first quarter of the year. Obviously, things have not just popped out of vacuum and a glance into the development shows us that all of these have been a WIP for the last five to six years.
Work, Labour and All Things Humans
People are unanimous about the limitation of this latest AI development across the globe, that only humans can make rational and informed decisions while these human attributes make the AIs work. Overall, AI tools have been around for a long time. We can attribute its meteoric rise to the English mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing and his theory of computation that he formulated during the mid-20th century. For a long time, it has brought forth several ethical and legal issues plus the concerns regarding sentience and whether machines can think just as Turing had written extensively. We will have the conversation about these issues some other day, and what’s pressing is the role of conversational chatbots in our ever-evolving lives.
To take an analogy, German philosopher Karl Marx redefined the meanings of work and workers in the 19th century. So many people, since then, have contributed to the study of, among others, labour, class struggle and false consciousness and so on. If we ignore the space for machines for a moment, then first, we have come a long way, and second, only the standard of living has increased though, all that Marx began with, are still human predicaments. Author and researcher Natasa Milojevic puts it succinctly: ‘In their battle to come to terms with the arrow of time, people have discovered different means to tame their enemy. They invented the clock, the calendar, and spent countless hours trying to figure out the concept of time.’
Once upon a time in the wake of the Industrial Revolution in Europe, it was natural for people to work for 10 to 16 hours a day, and unsurprisingly these people also include minors and under-aged children. We have come a long way from there and one of the founders of utopian socialism, Robert Owen, came up with his ground-breaking idea of ‘eight hours labour, eight hours recreation, eight hours rest’. That was still in the 19th century. Comparatively, working conditions have improved exponentially today, but the point is: we work as much as we used to, with much thanks to the birth and existence of multinational corporations and other big businesses. In one of the organisations that I worked a decade ago, it was a daily 10-hour shift, because of (a) one-hour lunch break, and (b) a two-day holiday every weekend. That’s the story of ordinary greedy capitalists in their perpetual pursuit of profit. What is remarkable is the fact that life remains the same— ‘solitary, poor, nasty, and brutish’, albeit ‘long’ now—despite the scientific developments and breakthroughs we have been encountering relentlessly. This is where, meantime, AI comes into the picture.
Technology as an Extension of a Human Body
Built on his concepts in media studies, Canadian philosopher, Marshal McLuhan posits that technology is an extension of a human body in the 1960s. It could not be more true for the AI technology. Sci-fi movies and scepticism, paradoxically, about human intelligence have opened up many arguments on the very existence of AI in the first place, especially regarding the fear of machines becoming sentient and superior. Besides the ethical issues, one major problem is the jobs for many knowledge workers becoming redundant. Yet it has become only mandatory to use this technology.
Digital technology might have made so many professions obsolete on one hand. Still it has also introduced so many newer avenues, right from those who are in automation to others who are in outsourcing for instance. Two factors, simultaneously, that make up a modern human society are consumption and the ever-increasing purchasing power. That’s how human existence has always been, and it will continue to be so, unless an unknown rock hits the Earth and all of us perish. To take an example, social media was non-existent three decades ago. According to the Statista, the number of people employed in the digital media sector was merely 8.1 thousand in 2013; and a decade later, the number is estimated to reach around 97.7 thousand across India. That’s also how human societies function: we are highly organic, and the only way is to grow and develop just as we do in our personal domains.
Bottom Line
Professionally I’m in media studies and teach this discipline as well—and these are two jobs out of a dozen of them that many people predict will become redundant. However, that’s only a prediction! It is doubtful that AI will ever automate our jobs completely for several reasons. Reason 1: AI cannot think for itself. Reason 2: the nature of the job roles that we have are based on human discretion to a great extent, such as the traditional pedagogies of lectures and discussions in a classroom. This will hold true regardless of how much a technology like ChatGPT becomes ‘conversational’. Reason 3: Smartphones and the Internet have compelled us to spend a lot of time in virtual reality but we also have a space where it is just impossible for the bots and machines to exist: the physical reality, leave alone the spiritual realms.
Only a sci-fi buff would say otherwise. We are not mechanical beings for a reason. On a side note, the only instance when I give in is when a robot asks me to click on the I’m-Not-a-Robot checkmark on certain websites. The audacity—a robot asking me whether I’m not a robot?! That’s still fine but what is problematic is how it will be helping indolent students to do their writing assignments.
When people started making films in the last century it was predicted that books would become obsolete. Look at us now. According to the Publishing Perspectives, Nielsen BookData and the Federation of Indian Publishers, the Indian print market is anticipated to reach close to US$12 billion in value by the end of 2024. The Publishing Perspectives also mentions that the market was valued at US$8.8 billion in 2019–2020.
Back to the starting again, in those days when cars were getting popular, we can only imagine about the convenience and efficiency that was never experienced in human history. Now, I spend only four hours travelling 3,500km on a flight to reach my hometown. A hundred years ago, it must have taken half a month by surface transport albeit it does not necessarily mean that we will be getting the reason for our existence soon. The rise of the AI chatbots and tools is a classic example of disruptive technology; and just as humans, technology must undergo evolution to improve its ever-changing relevance.
This article was originally published in the March-April 2023 edition of the Together.
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| I ordered ChatGPT to respond to a query and this is what I have received |
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