Smash The Looms

Ben Wildsmith 

When Sir Walter Raleigh showed up with his two signature products: chips and fags, I wonder if anyone sounded a note of caution. If the reckless uptake of AI is anything to go by, then probably not.

It seems that, as a species, we prefer to allow new phenomena free rein to ruin our lives before addressing inherent problems, particularly if there are a few quid to be made.

Eventually, we attempt to put the genie back in the bottle with regulations and health initiatives, but our collective instinct is to jump onboard whichever train is tooting its horn the loudest.

Let’s take the internet as an example. Here we are on it, like we always are, dependent on its connections for all our information and most of our interaction with the world. It has facilitated everything from revolutions to collaborative breakthroughs in science. Gosh, we love the internet!

That’s hardly the whole story, though, is it? The price we have paid for these benefits is shockingly high.

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Physically distant

As social connections have become physically distant, we have become distrustful and avoidant of each other. Even a phone call is considered intrusive, with text messages a more polite way to probe our bubbles of selfhood.

Democracy’s a goner. Now that we have ceased to cohere around our geographical locations, our influences have become so diverse as to make us ungovernable. Who amongst us hasn’t lost a friend to chemtrails, vaccine conspiracies, or God help us, ‘replacement theory’ over the last few years?

We have watched as entire, loveable human beings have been hollowed out and filled to the brim with bullshit they have read online.

Elections are won and lost on the capacity to hammer home three syllable slogans via memes. Resultingly, all elections are lost. Yeah, we had an election last year, want a new one now.

Yet, despite this recent exemplar, we are letting AI wash over us without a whimper of objection. We have already been told that it is going to render huge numbers of us unemployed.

Even the ‘progressive’ response is to beg a remittance from the machines, in the form of Universal Basic Income, so that we can continue to clutter up the planet in our obsolescence.

The space to observe the true, horrifying potential of this technology is Elon Musk’s X. I know you quit the platform months ago for Bluesky because someone on the internet told you it’s more ethical, but the world isn’t run by people like you or me.

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Grok

On X, the in-house AI ‘Grok’ is there to answer any query. Initially, people quite reasonably asked it to clarify matters of data. So, if someone claimed in a tweet that Labour was polling at 26% in the Senedd election, you could ask it to check that. It would collate statistics from all recent polls and give you a reasoned response to the claim. Sounds good, huh?

The problem here is that the technology’s perceived authority has a peculiar effect on human psychology. By definition, most of us are followers in one way or another. We must be or leaders wouldn’t be so rich.  We follow Jesus, or Nigel Farage, or, S Club Seven, or Jac O’ The North.

None of these cultural titans, though, can lay claim to the omniscience touted by Grok. Even Jesus had his faith tested and S Club ‘never had a dream come true’, bless them.

Grok, on its own platform, is the Oracle of Delphi. If it says something is true, then it is. Accordingly, people have started to ask it questions that they should, really, be asking of themselves. In particular, you’ll find people asking Grok if Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

Ethics

This is a question of law, where it remains disputed, but primarily of ethics. You, as a human being, take in the information you have about what is happening in Gaza and make a judgement call as to what language is appropriate for it. You have to, whisper it, judge the situation for yourself on the facts before you. And here is the secondary claw in the pincer movement that encircles us. We aren’t supposed to judge, are we? We mustn’t be judgy.

How convenient, then, to have a seemingly impartial arbiter of the truth at our fingertips! The algorithms speaking through our new God, though, are privately owned. The only truth they really serve is the empowerment of their owners and once they are through convincing us of political positions, having us talk to people who don’t exist, and doubting every thought we ever have, they will be there to soothe us, love us, and check that our bank details are up to date.

I’ll put this simply. If AI isn’t brought under democratic control, it will destroy humanity as a creative force and devalue life itself.

A human life is an exploration, a journey from ignorance to understanding. If the understanding of tech billionaires takes precedence over our own questing, then our lives become meaningless and, inevitably, dispensable.

‘As great as you are, man, you’ll never be greater than yourself.’ – Bob Dylan.