AI Is Killing Us

“The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering.”
– Tom Waits

When most people think of society’s collapse at the hands of our AI creations, they think of such scenarios as the Terminator, The Matrix, Ex Machina, etc…. And while the thought of our robot creations rising up and all but wiping out our civilization is something that is glamourized in movies, I think the death our society will be much quieter. I think it will be a slow and much more subtle decline. AI will replace any and all beautiful things that make us Humans.

AI will remove our ability to be creative, to learn, to teach, to share, to empathize, and ultimately to advance as homo sapiens. We’re seeing it happen already. It’s worked it’s way into every part of our lives and we are starting to reply on it more and more. In fact, it’s becoming almost imposible to escape it now. I used to think that it was something that most people rejected as a neat fad like it was when chatGPT came out but there have been some interactions that I’ve has recently that have made me realize that this is truly a tipping point in our trajectory.

I recently was in the market for a new laptop after mine had become an out of date dinosaur. Some of the younger readers out there may agree that I too am becoming one, but I digress. After deliberating for 24 hours and asking my good friend for some advice I decided on a Macbook. While picking the computer up, the advisor(?) at the Apple store showed me one single thing. And that was the AI features on the thing. I am familiar with the AI that is involved in google and Apples use of SIRI but I was flabbergasted when he showed me that not only could I ask SIRI to answer all of life’s greatest questions, I no longer had to actually respond to emails by myself! I could have her compose an entire response to Tammy congratulating her on her kids most recent community soccer victory! What a time to be alive! I can completely remove the need to connect with another human and have my computer simulate this.

At work as I was explaining the safety implications to using an older product that we sell to a customer, they were typing it all into chatGPT to see if I was telling the truth or not. He even showed me after when the AI overlords agreed with me. It was a real life south park episode playing out in front of me.

Even as I write this, there are constant suggestions to allow a computer to try to make this more interesting. Make it more comical, more heartfelt, more scholarly. In fact, I’m sure that even most blog posts on here are almost entire written with the help of AI. Our statuses on facebook suggest doing it, our posts on reddit recommend that we do it, our instagram stories recommend we stop thinking and stop creating while we allow computer programs to make our lives easier and make us all seem like educated, well read, funny, scholarly people.

We’re already losing our attention spans with reels and social media being the preferred method of checking out of real life these days. For a while now I’ve found myself looking up far too many things on google that should be basic knowledge. I’ve heard friends talk about actively walking away from chatGPT because they’re starting to ask it questions for everything. There’s starting to be long term data regarding our kids IQ and reading levels. They’re both trending downwards at a pretty alarming rate. The Flynn Effect is actually no applicable anymore. Almost 50% of adults in the United stated could be considered partially illiterate. Literacy isn’t just the ability to read but the ability to comprehend and understand more complex and longer sentences. Our ability to read and write has been a major factor in our ability to advance and become what we are now. It’s essential to our world. Without it, we’re cavemen.

There’s many recording companies that are exploring AI music. Real people could soon only need to sing along to a song that the mainframe wrote. We can release pictures and art that are made by something that doesn’t feel. That doesn’t know what emotion is and has no idea what it means to create something beautiful from a life that is so full of various ups and downs.

With the disconnect from our create outlets and other humans that share the same experience, we are becoming something that doesn’t know how to be empathetic. We don’t seem to care for other human beings anymore. All we care about is how popular we are online. We constantly strive to show the world how amazing and perfect our lives are as if we are something more significant than we actually are. People would rather film someone else dying to try to get imaginary points on the internet than actually try to save them now.

Eventually we will become a society of people that is entirely incapable of surviving on our own, making our own decisions, or creating our own destinies without our digital overlords. I don’t think that it will come riding in with a blaze of glory like the terminator did. I don’t think it will rise up and use us as energy like in the matrix. I think it will cause us to be so utterly useless that eventually we won’t have enough skills and love to keep our world going.