So I’m scrolling down my timeline on Facebook, all the while knowing everything I do is being logged by AI to continue building a profile on me to determine what will be posted on my timeline in the future.
While it is all very interesting, it occurs to me that the very thing that makes people, our human species, so interesting, is our unpredictability, our erratic natures, behavior driven by our creative brains. It occurs to me that asymmetry is more interesting than symmetry, and how the very creativity that makes us interesting is being killed by AI that feeds us only what it thinks we want. What it knows we want. A dull sameness. Symmetry. Staying within the lines. Lines dictated by AI. And I’m thinking, “so what’s the point?”
But if AI is as good as they say it is, then this has been anticipated? Is any one of us smart enough not to be outsmarted and consequently manipulated by AI?
“Soylent Green is people!” Remember that one? It just popped into my head.
Whoo boy, are we headed for trouble. It appears half the electorate is unable to understand even basic critical thinking. With AI, we’ll be lambs to the slaughter. Get ready kids. This is the world you’re about to inherit.
A friend posted a bit about contemporary music on his Facebook account today, prompting me to respond, “Crank up the Auto-Tune and plug in the synthesizer. Soon nothing will be what it really is, but nobody will care so long as it turns a profit.” Or words to that effect. It’s true, I think. We’re heading for an A-I future where nothing is what it appears to be. Including actor’s faces. Something the SAG/AFTRA negotiating team understands better than most, as they try and cut a deal for their member’s futures.
For me it started with Harrison Ford. I’m a huge fan of the actor and his Ark movies, but I wasn’t sure what to think when they let it out that they would be using A-I to give him a younger appearance in the “Dial Of Destiny” film. I thought it was a good movie, and Ford’s appearance didn’t bother me in the least, because it looked like Harrison Ford, only younger. So, no big whoop, right?
But then my wife turned on “The View” and my view of the whole thing changed. They had a movie director who also acts on the show promoting a new movie in which she is starring. I think that’s what they said? Thing is, the actress on the show looked nothing like the character in the movie. I mean nothing. Two different people. Isn’t that taking things a bit too far? I wasn’t sure. Could just be me, resisting the inevitable shift to the ultimate unreality of A-I. And then I had a thought. What if the woman on The View was only directing the picture and the woman starring in the movie was a different person altogether and I was just confused? Which is the way it turned out to be. I had to check out the film’s cast on IMDB to be sure. My thinking was all messed up, thinking the director was also the star. When she isn’t. But theoretically, she could be, because A-I would make that possible. Wouldn’t it?
I’ts easy to be confused when confronted by what seems to be the unlimited potential of A-I to alter our reality. Who needs actors when you’ve got computer generated images that look and sound like the real thing?
While I was pondering these hi-tech issues I received an audio track from a friend on my iphone. He had butt-dialed me from the bathroom. The audio was him clearing his throat and then flushing the toilet. After I stopped laughing I sent it back to him with a note that in the future he might want to stop taking his phone in the bathroom. So much safer. And yet, since nothing is what it seems to be anymore, I’m not sure any of it really matters. Soon, nothing will be as it seems, and we’ll all be clueless. Sucking up all the altered audio and video the professional influencers, propagandists and marketers send us and following wherever it leads, blindly comfortable in our arrogant self-assuredness that we’ve got it all figured out.
This brave new hi-tech world we’re entering into is clearly littered with pitfalls. But then, maybe not. It’s all so confusing. If only we had something less prone to organic failure to take the reigns and tell us what to do? How to live our lives? Wouldn’t that make more sense?
