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Fantastic Machines and How to Use Them

-- By JaredHopper - 13 Oct 2023

Introduction

In thinking about the pitfalls and perils of the "internet society," it is tempting to erase the leaps and bounds that developing technology signifies in human evolution. The "outsourcing" of high-analytic capabilities, which I will refer to in this essay as the trend towards pushing what we see as exclusively human traits into the domain of technology, to AI algorithms is terrifying to most of us. We don't trust cars to drive themselves because there is an inherently human type of caution, we think, that cannot be captured by a precarious mixture of cameras, motion sensors, and an algorithm. Even the development of delivery robots scares us: we might be ok with technology augmenting our reality, but it should not "walk" among us. Where does this fear come from? Obviously there are multiple root causes, but it may be helpful to think about just one within this essay's confines: outsourcing as dangerous to human development. It may certainly be the case that a society dependent on maximum technological integration, as I argue we are, has resulted in an evolutionary halt. For example, the capacity to solve simple arithmetic, while still useful in calculating a 20% tip at (some) restaurants, is essentially vestigial at this point, calculators having become a household device by the mid-1970s. But I think that fear in totally abandoning arithmetic in our early education comes more from a laziness in revising hundreds of years of pedagogy rather than from from a fear that not learning arithmetic will stunt mental growth. The transformation of function from essential to vestigial is, and has always been, a sign of evolution, not sliding backwards (looking at you, appendix). When viewing moments of outsourcing in the twentieth century ex-post, we are fine looking back on completed transfers of previously human tasks to automated systems as not only a good thing, but one essential to exponential progress. We fear changing, but we do not regret being changed.

Surrender

It is no secret that all of our data, our private information as well as most things we have said in the last decade, is no longer just ours. Corporations like Alphabet have broken into our homes and raided our medicine cabinets, our safes, and our lingerie drawers. The data is sold to other private corporations for a variety of purposes to fill the coffers of these data-mining titans like Alphabet. Free services do not exist.

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