As a software developer, the recent escalation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has aroused strong emotions and several concerns in me, either of technical and philosophical nature. The human-machine interaction is a fascinating topic and educated people, especially kids, should at least know the basic principles, in order to correctly related to machine and understand that usage and responsibility go hand by hand. The (ab)use of technology can affect mental sanity, therefore it is highly recommended to keep the worth distance: that set of little blinking lights might be deceiving and illusory.
After discussing on the impact of AI on the professional tasks of a code developer, this short digression will focus on problems that can be related to the inception of this new technology.
A threat against independent thinking
As a developer, programmer, coder -- or whatsoever definition you might want to apply to this job --, I think that our duties are more carved into heart than performed through the fingers that hop on the keyboard. There exists a sentimental bond between developers and problems.
Developing is not one professional category, but an attitude that translates into a specific job.
Struggling for the solution of a problem produces a spectrum of
feelings that continues to drag the history of the human race since the
early days: passion, dissatisfaction, generosity, ambition. Code
development boils down to a journey from the abstraction of thinking to
experience and action, and it does not concern programming alone:
languages and algorithms are just means. The heart work is the thinking:
satisfaction, joy, and reward come from ideas that prove to work well. You know
it: it's your creativity unleashed.
Problems are can be multi-faceted and so code development requires to watch
them from multiple perspectives for grasping in their entirety: the goal is
to plan and implement solutions. You are a master of coding if your solution applies to a wide
class of problems and pays a special attention to saving memory
resources.
True developers, especially those of the old school, are very keen in saving system resources, even if they are very very large. This is part of the attitude: just because, there might be situations in which the system is under pressure. We, as developer, feel responsible not to make it crash, as if systems are not of our property, but they had been lent to us.
Engineers, doctors, researchers in general, artists, chefs, bakers, carpenters, tailors, musicians, are examples of different forms of `developers': everyone codes in a specific way. Every production carries on an history of endeavors. People have taken problems to heart and they have attacked them until they found a solution. You are then an impostor, not a true developer, if you do not face problems by yourself.
With the advent of AI in programming, blogs and forums had actually reported the concerns of developers who are losing interest and hype, similarly to a game that have been started in cheat mode, as they are used to say: once you can do anything without difficulties, there is no more reason in playing it. These feelings were already circulating years ago, before the advent of AI, when the practice of including external modular packages turned the coding art into a miserable patchwork.
Many professional mathematicians have recently expressed disappointment in the involvement of AI for accomplishing proofs. Is the result more relevant than the path that leads to it? The Poincaré conjecture had been solved after a century of failures by a human being. Other conjectures are waiting, and they probably would for ever. But that's not the point. There might be problems that could not be such, semantically speaking, since they are statements that just foster research; the Continuum or the Riemann hypothesis have not been solved yet, but keep on sparking ideas and theories.
My consideration is as follows: what’s wrong in acknowledging our limits and in living within the same perimeter traced by the possibilities of our brain, assumed as a device? We must reach wherever we are able to, not beyond. Media had poisoned society with ridiculous and perverse messages as ‘live without limits’; but limits rule the universe and are a part of it, as taught by physics.
We are not entitled to live that way. It's just a commercial message, not the truth.
Nature already encodes all the rules for the good living. Our task should be to decode and follow them, if we want to keep living.
Back to developent and AI, I think that if we drop the chances of thinking, we will be more controllable by those that continue to think by and for themselves. Critical thinking needs continuous training. Critical thinking and conscience turn puppets into people.
If we continue to skip difficulties, for whatever reason, laziness will bring us to inaction.
The major difference from AI and human mind is not the power or memory, but conscience. Otherwise said, the possibility of drawing feelings from achievements: AI will not, you will not either through AI.
Threatening the future
AI has become infamous for requiring large amounts of energy and water. And who pays for them? Everyone and everything. The questions of AI technology, as devourer of resources, is intimately connected to the climate and the global warming, still overlooked by people, despite effects are tangible. Scientists had pointed that it's not an exception, but a trend could presumably scale up. We, as humans, and the entire planet Earth cannot afford AI, as we cannot afford wars, and the lack of logics among several social phenomena. I feel guilty for the other living species to pay the price of co-existing with us.
The scientific community has proved, without doubt, that the cause of global warming is anthropic. In plain terms, it is pollution. If we define ‘pollution’ as a general artificial factor that alters the conditions of a natural habitat, then we can establish two forms: ‘active’ (for example, the emissions of carbon monoxide) and ‘passive’ (draining the natural resources). Well, this is nothing under the sun: I can remember the warnings against the ‘ozone depletion’ in the late 80s. It seems that nothing had been made against the pollution after forty years. Now, we are paying the huge debt contracted by our ignorance.
What kind of world are we preparing to welcome young generations? Ecology should be a priority over all other disciplines: there would be no mathematics, chemistry, engineering, without the proper habitat for our race. We should be concerned with what ideas we let circulate. In this regard, I first observe that we are not governed by aliens, but by humans coming from our same cultural background. Moreover, media use to forget that all information they convey is automatically put ‘on the pedestal’ by the audience; media should not foster defects for commercial purposes, but promote better ways of living at the cost of going upstream.1
Most people are blind and do not surrender against the evidence. They keep living as they have been told to do: buy biggest or fastest cars, travel all over the world for mass tourism, live beyond your possibilities. Resources are not infinite and have (huge) costs. Such massive fruition of goods proves senseless against the recent events and it represent an expression of selfishness to me. Your daily habits promote worldwide conflicts for oil, for example.
The statement ‘with great power comes great responsibility’ should not be confined to a famous movie, but carved in everyone’s heart. The `great' power is not the big one. ‘Big’ refers to concentration, not to efficience. Everyone keeps a little, in quantity, but a great power in efficience. Our decisions are not little and insignificant: combined together, they affect the future of the society and the planet. Remember that 0 is irrelevant alone, but if many 0’s decide to follow the 1-leader, they become 100000000000… . Who is your leader?
Do we need of really bigger and bigger cars? Is it just a whim? Do we really need all those planes travelling in the sky? The bigger capacity of an engine, the more fuel, the more heat, and the more carbon monoxide emissions in the air. As known, white sugar looks fine, but indiscriminate use is conducive to addiction and brings lots of health issues.
Habits affect the habitat. There is no future without habitat. Nothing would have a sense, like the cheated game mentioned in the beginning. I believe that everyone who is not keen on keeping the home clean and safe will be eventually kicked out of it, and that it should be our prime directive.
Why should we want sons if we do not feel responsible of our habitat? Why should we cure diseases if we cannot preserve the life on our planet? World population must decrease in number during the next decades in order to resolve this mess. One of the basic principles in biology teaches that overcrowded systems are doomed to collapse. I feel frustrated by the decadent logic I see around. And you?
AI as expression of world market
It seems that we have decided that the raw and wild rules of trade market would regulate how the world goes on. Hence, we have to obey them now and also understand one of them: everything has a price to pay. The other is: the higher the demand, the higher the price.
Any technology threating against the natural habitat and its creator shall be classified as harmful and no good for living beings.
One of the critical problems of our society is the concentration of powers: for me, it is also the root of all evils. Since the ancient history, such concentration has proven to be detrimental. I mean to any form: political and economical.
The events in the last three centuries attested, more than before, that super-powered countries and corporations have contributed to render the world worse than what they found. Both entities must be dismembered for sake of our future, since they tend to disrupt welfare. AI is just the latest expression of such (and very big) concentration of powers. In fact, it's not something you can realize at home. Do you think that a little country would have interest or be able to wage a war in another continent? Do you think that little companies could have the power of conquering and dominate the global market?
Indifference, negligence are actually mortal sins. In the sense they can be assumed as a sort of pre-death state.
The higher-ups of world power had well understood this human condition since long time, and their persuasive campaigns are subtly planned to induce people to live in this pre-death state. People must take a position and understand that events are following as we are fighting a battle against evil forces.
Evil attitude does not care of future, it just aims at the profit from the present. I mean to the future world, that the next generations will live in.
From the square to the office
The fulcrum that levels society up has been changed from the square to the office: cooperation gave way to competition, generosity to selfishness and personal profit, simple living to career. As a result, 1+1 no longer yields 2. Philosophers and thinkers ended up to have less credit than politicians and executive managers. This is a serious problem when masses follow the decisions of people whose heart is kept in a wallet. Countries promoting a certain profit-based, competitive, and divisive culture should be embargoed.
I have been always got confused by the contradictions of modernity. World population keeps on increasing, but job opportunities reduce because workforce decreases because it is being replaced with automatic technology. Offerings are not transforming, opportunities are not changing, and it's the freedom of choice to fade away. This is a clear evidence that technologies are held by the rich to rule over the masses and guide their choices.
AI technology represents the ultimate expression of the concentration of powers. No care of natural habitats and resources, just efficience and profit. These are the purposes for which AI has been designed: it's an aberration of the human intellect. However, everything that does not lie within the perimeter of nature will be destroyed: nature is all what exists, pre-exists, and persists; anything diverging from the rules of nature has not warranty of keeping to be.
The world market rules must to be reformulated and based on different premises, that focus on people rather than profit. The path we are walking has long proved to be treacherous. What also are we waiting for taking a drastic turn? I hope we have not crossed the point of no return yet. I hope for the comeback to local micro-economies soon, with the exception of trading goods that are strictly required but not locally available. And cooperation comes around here again.
Like the flight of Icarus
Internet was originally a square, not a market. It must be relieved from the heavy weights of social networks, Ads, and AI.
AI represents the latest crime committed against humanity and climate, after wars, pollution, consumerism, capitalism, social networks, abuse of resources, and certain filmography. There should be no reasons for keeping this thing on: shutting AI definitely down would represent a step forward to solving the aforementioned problems. Turn your large-scale data centers into gardens and forests. Free servers from worthless contents. Get out and play with people.
The history of the human race is the history of human thinking. It must not turn into the history of AI. Your picture of progress might be illusory, and you should surrender to evidence.
Do not bother with the freedom of expression and censorship. Your supposed level of freedom can be maximal only if you live alone, otherwise it had to be scaled down to a level that grants respect to all members in a group.↩︎