ALGC PROJECTS

It is much more fun to look forward with anticipation for new technologies than to decry them before they even arrive at your door.

 

All of a sudden, it seems, artificial intelligence technology has been blasted to the forefront of public attention. If you aren't already aware, programs like Midjourney, Dall-E, Chat-GPT, and soon, Google's Bard, are capable of producing creative work, nearing, at, or far beyond the skill of an average human, and in far less time. There's been an incredible amount of discourse surrounding the uses and misuses of this new technology, which continues to exponentially improve month by month, along with possible methods of regulating it. I think it's best to leave these arguments to the people who actually care about them, because although I'm very much interested in the nuances of this subject, I can't say that I particularly care or have any original thoughts to share. Instead, the question that this Dispatch is concerned with is thus: what will be the legacy of these technologies, and how will they, like the internet, eventually be integrated into regular human life?

 

The most important thing for you, dear reader, to understand about artificial intelligence technologies and their effect on human lives, which took me a little while to comprehend myself while researching for this essay project, is that none of this is speculation or hypothetical. It is difficult to wrap ones head around just how fast these changes are taking place right now. The best illustration I've seen is a chart that MKBHD, a tech analyst and reviewer on YouTube, created showing the rate at which new technologies in the past have gained a user base of 100 million people. The telephone, for example, took 75 years before reaching that number, compared to the mobile phone, which only took 16 years. FaceBook famously only took two years to reach 100 million users, TikTok only needed nine months, and Chat-GPT, a text-generating service produced by Open-AI (recently aquired by Microsoft), took only two months to hit that same milestone.

 

I'm not sure if there's ever been clearer evidence that the rate at which the world continues to change is only increasing. The replacement of Google with an artificially intelligent personal assistant may be only a few months away. Reporters who are working in conflict areas may soon be able to upload video and notes they've taken to their computers and have articles instantaneously written and published for them by AI writing tools. And the era of you spending an hour every day responding to emails may soon be over, as AI might be able to draft responses to non-urgent messages, and then you can simply review them before hitting send. These are only a few examples off the top of my head of ways in which artificial intelligence might impact our daily lives.

 

One thing that I've noticed about myself over the last five years or so is that as technology becomes more and more intrusive in our lives, the more my instinct is to distance myself from it. Hence my hand-written notes, homemade journals, and typewritten drafts of everything. It might be surprising then to hear that I'm actually really excited for the continued advancements in AI technologies, because I think they will be remembered as a reaction to, and solution for the problems with the current state of the internet.

 

Although the internet continues to change the world and how our lives work in new and unexpected ways, I think it's safe to say that the technology behind it is no longer in its infancy. Rather than a brave new world with unlimited possibility and potential, the internet is now, for most of the people who use it, a rather mundane and bureaucratic thing, full of passwords, two-factor authentication codes, and zoom conferences. The infrastructure of the internet, from the largest deep-sea fiber-optic cables to the simplest desktop setup in someone's studio apartment, has begun to blend in with the rest of our lives, which go on as usual.

 

And for the generation of computer programers, photographers, filmmakers, artists, musicians, etc, who managed to weild the internet to enable their creativity through social media platforms, the internet has become a sort of chore, a machine that needs to be maintained in order for audiences to stay actively interested in the work one produces (because all creative people nowadays seem to need an audience). There are so many social media accounts, each one demanding new content and answers to direct message inquiries, that are seemingly all necessary to build a personal brand. Being a user of the internet in 2023, especially one who wants to use the internet to build a career, can sometimes feel much more like a net negative for the amount of time that one must dedicate to it.

 

And so when I imagine a near-future where AI tools could help me send and manage emails, reply to and sort comments by relevance, and produce simple text/image based content for social media, I imagine a future where creators like myself could once again take advantage of the internet, without pouring all of our valuable creative time into it. In other words, I might in the future be able to live a tranquil analog life, and have an artificial intelligence interface with the world on my behalf.

 

- ALGC

 

Thanks so much for reading! Also, if you're interested in learning more about AI stuff, here's some places to do that:

 

Tom Scott: "I tried using AI. It scared me."

 

MKBHD: "The Biggest Problem with AI!"

 

New York Times: "A Conversation With Bing's Chatbot Left Me Deeply Unsettled"

 

CGP Grey: "How AIs, like ChatGPT, Learn"