Outsourcing Thought

I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.
Alan Turing, 1950.

Anyone that has met me will tell you that I'm a nerd and that I care about others, even when my own neurodivergence makes it more difficult than it should to present myself on certain occasions. And on that note, given the current economic and political scenario, there is a topic that gains more and more attention to the point that it is what controls a great part of the world these days, and it greatly concerns me: AI.

Since I'm a nerd, I have a great deal of technical expertise in the matter, I have played with these types of models for years and I was even excited at some point about the tasks they would help us solve. Machine Learning has been utilized in R&D for decades helping decode things that we could only have dreamed of otherwise, and it is the reason technology has advanced to the point it has nowadays.

The concept of machine learning has been around since the late 1950's and it has always worked under the implication that machines can process instructions faster and more accurately than the human brain. This much continues to be true today; the biggest difference is that corporate executives got a hold of the concept and it decided to rebrand it as AI, Artificial Intelligence, and more accurately GAI or Generative Artificial Intelligence, permitting it to reach the mainstream diverting its use from advanced scientific tool, to flat out slop generation to keep us humans at bay.

In this article, I want to emphasize the A part of the acronym, and dive into the implications, and contrast the benefits and drawbacks of these advanced machine learning algorithms, to see where the world is going and how we can help divert it back to a place where we can believe our eyes again.

Photo by Artur Ament / Unsplash

Artificial. That is it. By definition, not human or organic. As something that is created by us, these algorithms use us for training and have managed to mimic us in extreme detail, to the point that the conversation of things being created by AI is constantly dominating our time and efforts.

Most emails, blogs, news, recipes, you name it, these days, are, at least partially, generated by one of these algorithms, and more and more people use it on a daily basis to lighten the load of responsibilities. "If I use (Insert LLM name here) to write these emails, I will have more time to work on these other thing, etc.", and further, "if I use it for this other thing, then maybe I can spend some time watching these vertical videos that are also generated by it."

A few decades ago, before the mainstream introduction of the cellular phone as an ubiquitous device, most people had a couple of phone books: one or two given by the municipality with all the publicly listed available phone lines, and one that was often made by us, with our close family, friends and acquaintances. Enter the cellphone and all these numbers were now stored in our pocket and traveling with us wherever we went. All we needed to do was look up the name of the person we needed to call, and the cellphone would remember and dial their number. We could now free up some of that hippocampus real estate for more important tasks! Success!

The same phenomena is being observed nowadays, but with reasoning and thought being sacrificed instead, homogenizing the output to create this millenial-gray version of our thought environment, where em-dashes and emojis flow seamlessly and pollute what once were natural and imperfect conversations and expressions. This race to be clean and seamless, losing the decoration and detail, ultimately arrived at language and by virtue of the incredibly polluting idea that "time is money" and every second you waste not producing anything is money wasted, in a society that values what you have instead of who you are, has forced our hand into using every trick in the book to maximize gains.

Photo by Liam Briese / Unsplash

And because maximizing gains is the motto of the current flavour of capitalism, we cannot speak about human decline without speaking to the real cause behind it, which is, obviously, corporate greed and a system that requires us to continue buying the new version of the thing we already have, time and again. The eternal consumer, but now without the ability to think critically about the things happening around them, only producing for a world that does not need their output, but that keeps feeding the algorithm until the next cycle.

The tools are there to be used, and some times they can be helpful in the right context and environment. But gAI is not a great tool, is a tool designed to hijack our empathy and place our attention somewhere else so we stop talking to one another and force ourselves into a smaller and smaller silo every time. And I can see how you think that you need to use it to maintain a specific output, one post per week, one video here and there, write a script for the next reel, etc. and all just so you can find a way to make another buck and get ahead of a life that becomes more and more asphyxiating with costs and conflicts.

Speaking of upgrade cycles, costs, conflicts, environment, etc. Have you noticed that the more we rely on AI to come up with solutions, the sloppier these solutions get? But also, most electronic manufacturers are preferring to sell directly to these AI data centres directly instead of consumers because they buy by the thousands and spend literal billions on single parts, to the point that companies are promising 100% of their production capacity to AI companies, making it more difficult and way more expensive to buy things like storage drives, or memory for your computer at home.

Not to mention the fact that entire neighbourhoods are going without water and with elevated electrical bills, in order to subsidize and power these data centres. Because of course paying taxes is not a thing they are into and caring about poor people in poor neighbourhoods isn't a thing they care about either.

So they're messing with the environment, making it easy to collect our data, making us way worse at thinking, and spreading a big thick coat of gray on top of everything colourful about us, and we are somehow supposed to like it and think it is the greatest thing since the invention of the wheel?

Okay, this might be turning into a rant and I don't care for it. So let's figure out what is it that we need to do next! There are ways of taking our things back and use the tools only when it's necessary: Let's make a pact to write our emails, blogs, scripts, etc. ourselves. Let's use the tools only when we need to. Let the machine learning computing be a tool for the scientists looking for the next breakthrough, instead of Brad the CEO, looking to remove more people from payroll without caring about an enshittified experience, that we have already come to expect.

And ultimately, even if you view it as an incredible tool and think that I'm just an old man yelling at a cloud, do you not think that the supposed innovation isn't more than a desire to generate immediate output in a society that has lost all patience and capacity for waiting? Do you really believe that the countless image, video and code generators out there aren't simply a result of people who weren't good at those things and hated having to ask someone else to do it and have to wait AND PAY for these things?

We were once told that machines would do the jobs nobody wanted to do, so we could dedicate ourselves to the things we wanted to, but instead we are outsourcing the art, writing and creating to the machines, while stuck doing the things we did not want to do to begin with. Ah yes... and Copyright is very much a thing for you and me, but not for them...

Talk to your neighbours, write real messages, make spelling mistakes, be imperfect, enjoy imperfect art, etc. These are all things that makes us human, and unable to replicate the same thing twice perfectly. We can be very good at many things, but those imperfections are what makes things unique, and we shouldn't be striving to lose them.

Anywho, if you're still here and agree with my rant (or you don't) drop me a line if you want at [email protected]; and if you aren't yet, please subscribe to my newsletter in the box below.