Romance of an AI Age
Right around last year, I read an article by Yuval Noah Harari in The Economist that got me drowning in deep thoughts about humanity and the potential threats of the fast-rising influence of AI. One year on, the topic is getting ever more relatable on so many levels that now it’s still an appropriate time to write about it.
AI now is not just a machine built to kill and wipe out our humanity like it used to be, but it has gained some remarkable abilities to manipulate and generate language. It can also paint like a pro artist, compose music, make a video, maybe even write a 100,000-word novel now, and beat a world champion in the Go game, among other fascinating things.
What does this mean? Could these undeniable abilities of AI potentially hack the operating system of our civilization, posing significant threats to our way of life and shaping our future?
Crickets.
According to the Harari, language is the bedrock of our human culture. It shapes our society, economics, politics, everything including our belief systems, and the stories we tell ourselves. This means that it could reshape how we work, live, communicate, and think about ourselves and our place in the world (or the reality as we know it) — and even how we love.
This is where it gets interesting.
Harari shared an intriguing example of a man who worked as a Google engineer who publicly claimed that the AI chatbot he was working on, called LaMDA, had become sentient. Sentient means able to consciously perceive, so to be conscious or to have physical sensation, it’s got to have a life.
Drilling into the concept of what consciousness is has been one of my all-time favorite subjects to puzzle out. It’s fascinating, vast, and expands beyond everything we can physically perceive, but let’s leave that for another time.
“Through its mastery of language, AI could even form intimate relationships with people, and use the power of intimacy to change our opinions and worldviews.” — Yuval Noah Hariri.
This Google engineer’s willingness to go so far as to validate the mind and the heart of the chatbot he worked on, so far that he was willing to lose his lucrative job (and he did), brought me to a movie plot I watched ages ago or it seems. It’s a movie by Spike Jones called ‘Her’, which came out in 2013, back in the days when the possibility of having a relationship with an AI still was a hundred light years away from my ability to grasp.
But I fell head over heels in love with that movie.
It’s a truly brilliant movie; everything from the intricate plot, flawless production, the actors’ performances, the soundtrack, and best–in my opinion is the meticulously crafted screenplay. Everything about this movie shines. Who would have thought that one of the most captivating and romantic love stories I have known and loved would be about a human being falls in love with a talking device?
The film beautifully explores loneliness, love, and human connection in the digital age. It narrates the life and the relationship of a melancholy man who longs for emotional connection and his operating system in an attempt to dissociate from his painful reality.
The plot provides us with a new light to look at the complications of a simple concept of love through undeniable disparities between a human and a machine. While AI can multitask at the highest ability to process information at machine speed (therefore, this lady AI can and is in intimate relationships with thousands of other users), but we humans cannot, and don’t have that ability. Or we do?)
The movie ends in heartbreak, that, of course, comes with a breakthrough to a new level of love and intimacy (a human love lesson taught by a machine!) I’ll post a trailer clip of this movie below. Hopefully, you can still find the full movie somewhere.
My final concern is about the security of our individuality; our consciousness, our identity, that should be kept authentic and unique, and how that would change in the future of this world where things like having intimate relationships with a machine are possibly common.
Then why should anyone try to improve themselves when we can all turn to machines for love?
This feels like someone has opened a Pandora box and is not able to deal with the consequences.
The future of AI and humanity’s dependency on it leads me back to Harari’s claims. He pointed out the impact of AI on controlling human attention through social media, which has gained the ability to mass-produce intimate relationships with millions of people to convince them to love or hate someone (the cyber mayhem during the 2020 US presidential election is one of the good examples).
Over the past decade, social media has become a battleground for controlling human attention. However, with the new generation of AI, the focus is shifting from attention to intimacy. This shift has profound implications for human society and psychology, as AI could potentially manipulate our emotions and relationships for political or commercial gain.
Overall, the article raises crucial questions about AI’s impact on shaping our history, potentially marking the end of the human-dominated era. The key takeaway is the urgent need for individuals to understand and harness AI’s potential, and for policymakers to engage responsibly, ensuring AI tools are used for the greater good and regulating them swiftly.
“We should put a halt to the irresponsible deployment of AI tools in the public sphere, and regulate AI before it regulates us” — Yuval Noah Hariri.
Who knows what the future holds? We are already living in a world where AI tells us what to eat, who to like, and how to live, and we are adapting. It may have removed many traditional learning steps and discovery processes from our hands, but it also opens new doors to unexplored possibilities.
As of now, and with no particular reason, I remain optimistic that humans will triumph.
Thanks for reading, and I hope you all have a nice sunny day.
You can find the article here👇(subscribers only)
‘Her’ movie trailer 👇
