"Turn the old; return to them. Things do not change; we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts."
~ Henry David Thoreau, Walden
A new commercial keeps reappearing, just in the past week or so. It shows a young woman utilizing a new AI "feature" to essentially trick people into thinking she is someone she is not. There are a couple of variations of this advertisement I have seen, one in a personal setting and the other related to the workplace, and in both, after cleverly deceiving someone, she looks at the camera with a look of clandestine delight. This is presented as a positive development for us all.
There are several obvious problems, if we are reflective and honest enough to consider them. She is not being her authentic self, and were this to occur in "real and actual life", it would eventually be exposed she's not quite as clever as her deception has presented. She would be caught without her crutch, eventually, sooner or later, and she would be set backwards on her path, all the worse for it. The notion that is being presented here, in the workplace scenario for example, is it's better to "get ahead" than to be your actual self. In the personal scenario, it's even worse, as what sort of a relationship would she expect to establish when she feels she isn't "good enough" to be who she is?
The lingering, repeating message is that we are "less" as our authentic selves and AI makes us "more".
As I was pondering writing this blog post, I was finishing re-watching a poignant documentary called The Automat. It's about the history of a very special, innovative dining establishment that was once very successful, with owners who genuinely cared about the people they served and employed, who welcomed everyone through its doors. In the case of the automat, innovation wasn't harming people. It was actually helping. How the automats ceased to exist is the poignant part, and we are led to reflect upon change. I wish they still existed. We could use these places today. I was too young and never lived in the area of the country where they once were, but no doubt several of my family members (primarily on the "other side") who grew up in the New York City area (or arrived there as immigrants) experienced the wonder of this place.
The documentary has a lot to say about change and human dignity - and about creativity as well. The problem with AI is no matter how you feel about change as it was, change as it is today de-humanizes at a level well beyond any change before. Will we see through it?
Treasure and nurture your innate creativity. Treasure your beautiful vulnerability as a human being. Don't let anybody tell you that you are "less". You are "more" beyond imagining. No artificial construct can approach what you are. The "supermind" they seek has existed forever, and it isn't what they think it is.
Nature photo by Susan Larison Danz.
