The Real World
How truth, beauty, and goodness make a better home for us all
Yesterday evening, a commercial for artificial intelligence interrupted our nightly viewing of Brooklyn Nine-Nine. (Ten points from Slytherin on that issue alone.) It showed a man sighing about a long-winded email he’d just received, and he promptly asked an AI chatbot to summarize for it him. I can’t remember the marketing slogan that followed verbatim, but the gist of it was how little time we have to do pesky things like read someone’s email, so we should just get AI to do it for us.
I threw my hands in the air and cried in a mocking voice, “Wouldn’t want to actually do something ourselves, now would we?” (I have become my father. This is (almost) 40.)
Artificial intelligence is not inherently evil, but it is unique in that it blurs (or, in some cases, obliterates) the line between what is real and what is false, with no simple rubric for the average user to distinguish between the two. It also asks us to sacrifice things that are sometimes frustrating, but useful—learning to wait, figuring out solutions, engaging with obstacles—in order to gain a life without friction. Which is not life, but a fantasy, an un-reality moving us closer and closer towards disembodiment.
Technologies of convenience and speed are one thing; a complete takeover of the lived human experience is another altogether.
