The theme of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer couldn’t be more relevant. Although it’s a film about unleashing deadly technology in the 1940s, today this has become routine. Companies and governments are taking huge liberties with human life, and livelihoods. The creative industry unions aren’t happy and anger is boiling up in Hollywood. Much of this is directed at AI tech companies, studios and streaming giants like Netflix.
EOSHD looks at the unnerving parallels between that of disruptive technology and the atom bomb.
Picture the scene. Civilisation goes through an Industrial Revolution over many years. Eventually people are forced to confront a deadly build-up of consequences.
We’ve embarked on an odyssey, with so many opportunities and discoveries, only to end in catastrophic environmental disaster. Throughout our story the common thread is disruptive technology. It brings enormous wealth. People have an irresistible urge to part of something huge, and take risks.
Cars are everywhere, lifting us out of the mud. Factories everywhere. Microchips in every pocket, eventually into every brain with neural implants. From the 2020s the digital era really ramps up, and gives rise to even bigger transformations of what it means to be human. The hybrid machine/human is born.
More powerful than governments, private companies and their quest for profit involves the release of ever more dangerous technologies and biological implants. The outcomes are impossible to predict. Suddenly the world has unleashed a existential force, out of our control.
The technologies combine and are shapeshifters. Nanotechnology allows machines to reproduce by themselves. Mass production of neural implants, a cure for aging, generative artificial intelligence – enormous opportunities sweep across the world in a matter of years, and the genie doesn’t go back in the bottle. Suddenly, everything has changed.
We seem powerless to stop it, but eventually nature steps in. Climate disaster, catastrophic heat, food shortages and floods push civilisation to the brink of war. Then it happens, nuclear warfare – and life on planet Earth is reset. It goes back to a primitive, natural state, like living in Slough, but once again the cycle of destruction begins all over again – like when our primeval ancestors learned to use bones as a weapon.
At the start of this movie (by Andrew Reid, assisted by AI writing assistant named “Dave”) a primate throws a bone into the air to signify the start of the odyssey all over again. I have no idea where the AI gets such original ideas from.
A perpetual cycle of birth and death, creation of tools and destruction of life.
Back to the present day and an even more terrifying thing has happened.
Gerald Undone.
YouTube has replaced the written word as the technology to get a point across.
Social media has replaced articles and film.
‘Influencers’ have even superseded TV personalities.
Most terrifying of all, these new ‘celebrities’ are even worse role models than the last generation. It is all because of technology, introduced to make our lives easier and make us a more intelligent species.
Best laid plans and all that.
Yet this may not seem as dangerous as an atom-bomb, or a biological weapon with the capability to destroy all human life.
But it’s a drip, drip, drip.
What begins as a trivial thing like TV or quite mundane at first, like social media, morphs into the devil.
This is a statement which has stuck with me for nearly 20 years, and which rather ironically I have on one of my social media profiles:
To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world – and at the same time threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are.
– Marshall Berman
Berman was an American philosopher, who died in 2013. His wisdom probably isn’t the top concern of most people. If you’ve heard of him, you’re doing well!
The current generation get their life-affirming quotes from TikTokers, instead of philosophers and writers.
Perhaps TikTok’ers are the new philosophers?
Either way, the death of philosophy, spirituality and the written word will have a profound impact on our world.
Just wait and see.
I feel it every day.
This blog post is tears in the rain, and probably should really be a video.
I feel a loss of humanity, and it is down to technology really ramping up.
So it is time to take control and get involved with it.
Bend it to our needs.
Force it to work with us, assist us, rather than take over from us.
Regulate it and design it responsibly, tame the power in a way that doesn’t dilute it but causes it to serve us better and in really good creative ways.
This way, AI will not become like social media – playing to our baser instincts, persuading us what to buy, who to be angry at and what conspiracy to believe in next.
What comes next is going to be a shock.
The online world in historic terms is still at the start, it’s very young. This is a technology which hasn’t fully grown up yet. It may have changed completely since the 1990s “library” version of the internet, an era which was text based mainly – but it still has such a long way to go.
AI is a critical turning point. There are profound dangers now in what kind of genie is coming out of the bottle compared to the 90s and 00s.
The consequences are so unpredictable, the risks can’t be quantified at all – just like that of Oppenheimer’s pioneering work with nuclear weapons. He knew there was a risk of a nuclear bomb turning into an uncontrolled chain reaction which could destroy the planet.
It had never been tested before, but the cat was out of the bag and they had no choice but to dive into the unknown abyss with it.
They did the usual calculations, statistics, damned lies and statistics, but these don’t deal with the unknown and what simply cannot be quantified.
The long term risks were unrelated to the science of the day and the narrow scope of nuclear physics. The long term risks involves chaos theory and society. Human nature, politics.
That’s why it’s probably impossible to simulate with computers years into the future to see how AI pans out.
So the development will go on regardless of how many hypothetical situations of risk are proposed or how many job losses it might lead to in the future. We have to get there first, and THEN consider the outcome.
We cannot pre-empt it.
At the moment the risks take on an almost subjective form.
They’re not large, not small, they’re absolutely unknown and mysterious.
Therefore it is impossible to justify drastic action here and now to investors or board members, about shutting down AI development – especially when you’re talking about a complete closure of business due to some kind of subjective risk factor.
Again like with Oppenheimer, the people working on the Manhattan Project knew that if they didn’t develop the bomb, someone else would. This is even more terrifying because the only thing worse than inventing something unimaginably powerful is if someone ELSE does it! It is always better to have some control and to be leading yourself. That way you take your own fate in your own hands. There’s of course the geopolitical element as well.
With AI I believe it should be democratic Western countries that lead the way. If China or Russia take a resounding lead in AI, it will be even more dangerous due to the nature of their governments and military.
Such a nightmare scenario for the US, the UK, Germany or Japan falling behind in AI due to over-regulation has the potential to inflict untold misery on The West. It would be a scale of economic collapse so big that it will be a catalyst for a major World War.
AI regulation is an issue which is in fact at the heart of the Hollywood strike action taking place this summer in 2023. AI is being discussed already by film industry union members all over the world.
Meanwhile, in Silicon Valley…
Let’s suppose you’re a board member of Netflix, Paramount Pictures, or Google and you see Open AI making ChatGPT, what do you do?
This startup has the potential to wipe out your entire business!
Let’s assume you’re the boss of Netflix and all that free money for growing subscriber numbers has gone away due to high interest rates. What do you do to cut costs next?
You’re definitely not thinking about AI leading to the extinction of humanity.
You’re in a role, you have short term, short sighted vision! You go to work very focused on money, and come home again and go to sleep. You might pretend to care about the bigger picture in the press interviews. In the marketing. That’s performative, the reality of the business is different. You need AI.
You’re getting on with making a profit and bringing new products to fruition.
The consequences of AI are insidious so making day-to-day business decisions based off such alarmist conjecture and fear is pointless.
Let’s look at history, in the past we were poorer, died younger, went to die in war regularly and didn’t have a very comfortable or healthy lifestyle compared to today. So you can point to technology and progress, and say it’s on balance “Thank you”. It has improved the world, it is exciting. It’s inspiring and useful.
And that is undoubtedly true.
Therefore, AI as a creative tool which is here to stay.
We’ve got to make the most of it, and not get left behind by being ignorant of it.
There comes a point where technology crosses a line, it goes from being useful to being destructive on enormous scales. We enjoyed driving around in cars without thinking about the climate for many decades.
Who can we trust and look to in the world who has the power to see that this doesn’t happen again with other inventions?
The answer is nobody. I don’t think any person, any government, any company and any country has any overall control of the situation (although a lot of people pretend to be making a big difference, they’re in fact not).
Welcome to life.
This is the ultimate cycle of life. If you live, the consequence is that you also have to die.
So even though the current pioneers and innovators in AI might sit around a table with the government and discuss regulation and ethics, that sort of thing – it might end up being pointless. Perhaps you simply cannot control what’s coming.
Finally, what makes Berman’s observation on technology so true is that it acknowledges this double edged sword.
At the same time as it promises us adventure and wealth, it threatens to destroy everything we are.
We need to treat change as inevitable. I am sure the situation is the same across the universe with other civilisations too. They lived, then they died. Which is why even with a 5 billion year head start none of them have even said hello yet!
So if AI leads to a brave new world, be part of it and have your role in it.
The worst thing to do is not to be an onlooker, as that is to choose not to live at all.
