AI’s Silent Takeover: Part 2 – Who’s making the choices?

“Because it is there”, said George Mallory, the legendary climber, when asked why he wanted to summit the Mount Everest, in what proved to be a fatal attempt on his part! But the story of his endeavour endures as an inspiration for others. As do many other such stories, including stories of how a Napster, or Mac, or iPhone or Windows came to be.

Now, consider this – Meta aims to build newer experiences, leveraging and building on Llama3. An use case is, enabling people speaking different languages to collaborate in real-time!

As enthralling as it sounds, it begs several questions:

• are all of us alike, carry the same contexts, perceive in ways that are entirely similar
• Translating words and sentences from one language to another – could it be a mere transactional exercise or is it a deeper and more involved exercise, built on more robust foundations of civilizations, and on dimensions such as – culture, lived experiences, the likes?

Would AI step in there as well to translate and mediate between cultures instantly to ensure smooth, seamless collaboration ?  If AI might get there eventually, the prospects are quite grim to say the least.

For, it probably strikes at the root of how humanity has evolved to get here, where it is.

Though, scraping copyrighted content to train LLMs, and then making tall moral claims about need for regulation, does not really inspire confidence about how we’ve evolved J!

But, jokes apart, would humanity be as evolved, if not for the sheer diversity of thoughts that exist on this planet, within and across cultures, transcending and thriving beyond timelines.  What then, of the thrill of human endeavour which brought humanity to where it is today, even if it is in this state of discombobulation today about who’s really in charge – as against AI !

“Jerome had been engineered with everything he needed to get into Gattaca, except the desire to do so”;

says Vincent, the protagonist of the brilliant, Sci-fi imagination from Hollywood, ‘Gattaca’, a movie that NASA scientists rated the topmost amongst those that imagined the future. Given that genetic engineering is at the core of this story, and that the gene editing tool CRISPR is already being put to mainstream application, the world of Gattaca does seem very much plausible.

Different flavours and versions of AI seem to be acing several different Turing tests all around, beating humans at their own games. But, not every transaction or action in the world of humans is always governed by strict set of rules and regulations. There’s still the unsaid, the unstructured, the intangible which we keep endeavouring to control and manage.

We’re not yet inhabiting the world of ‘Gattaca’ where genetic engineering determines one’s pathway, including what is learnt or what social roles or professions are assigned. The protagonist, deemed ‘invalid’ due to genetic configurations and sidelined DNA based selection, endeavours to cheat the system and achieve his objectives, a story of the triumph of human spirit and aspirations – As Gattaca’s tagline goes

“There is no gene for human spirit”!

Therein lies the mystique, which enables us to fill the gaps in our evolution wherever there’s a lack of sufficient structure, and which allow us to philosophize and interpret, without  which the world would lose the myths and stories that inspired it to dream and progress.

But this is not all. It is not just about spirit and endeavour. If AI can interpret on our behalf, what of ‘agency’, some of which we’ve already surrendered to AI when we happily accept suggestions about what to see, hear, read, or even believe, as happens via many of the social media platforms such as Facebook, and YouTube.

Hitherto, what is right and not so right was always determined by stories that were edited and distributed by humans. But, isn’t this media of information, as we know it, fast losing prominence, as the editors are replaced by algorithms that give us the stories that we want to hear, playing on the human quest for dopamine boost, which the social media agencies are most happy to deliver, in exchange for information on our ‘preferences’, which is the new financial currency;  and, in the process feeding a monster that we probably do not yet grasp fully yet!

Whilst we’re enamored by this power of technology that delivers what the mind seeks, and are ensnared by its hold over us, what we’re also losing is ‘Agency’ , our ability to choose what we want to see, hear and consume, and which, in turn impacts our ability to decide and act.

Storyteller