4 Reasons Why I am not an AI enthusiast

Around 4 years ago, a good colleague of mine invited the whole office to take a visual test developed by a Russian physicist to determine how human you are in your thought process (Not a Turing Test), it was a visual and communications test.

I won the most robotic person in the office (not that good for a PM, eh) and my good friend and Data engineer Lilit Gabrielyan won the most human person.

The test measures how you form thoughts and connect the dots together, and based on that I shall be happy that AI is taking over yet, here are the 4 reasons why I am not an AI enthusiast

1. Idiocracy!?

?Have you ever watched Luke Wilson’s Idiocracy? (If not, I strongly advise you to do)?

Luke Wilson (Joe Bauers) in the movie, is an army librarian who undergoes a hibernation experiment, and wakes up 500 years into the future, in a society where he becomes the smartest man in the world, just for knowing how to count 2+2 !

In this dystopian yet functional society of idiots, where water is replaced by Brawndo, a sports drink owned by a corporation that also owns the FDA and multiple other health federal authorities, Luke was sentenced to public execution, when water didn’t immediately work!

The smartest man alive is not so smart among idiots, or in other words, when everything is shit, then shit is the new norm.

That’s very similar to the corporates’ approach to AI, and automation:

1. How many times have we requested “Live Agent” when chatting with Bots?
2. How many calls were closed when the automated system resulted in no resolution to our issues?

Yet still, you will find that the main focus of the call center industry is how to automate live agents using AI ?? not taking such frustration into consideration.?

Let me repeat again, their goal is not to automate unnecessary interaction, or reduce cost of live agents, their goal is to fully automate live agents.

2. Not everyone is white

I am a mixed race guy, even though my skin is light, I am definitely not a white person, and I really don’t want that to matter.

And before we dig deeper into that, let’s start with some fun data:

1. 75% of all Resumes submitted in the US are read by AI (Zip Recruiter’s CEO Ian Siegel)
2. Joy Buolamwini the canadian american computer scientist at MIT Media labs, called the large data fed to AI “Pale Male Data”
3. This Research by Harvard business Review on how most Recruitment algorithms actually introduce bias

There is a famous quote that says:

if you are not paying for the product, then you are the product

That quote perfectly applies to both social media and Advertising businesses.

One thing that benefited social media like Facebook, Twitter etc was the angry crowd, the more angry the users are, politically or socially, the more they engage, and the more they engage, the more money facebook makes from Advertising.

Now imagine, all the angry posts, articles, data in general by biased teams on both sides of the aisle, the amount of fake information, and the amount of Racism ??

“Lügenpresse” or "lying press", was a term widely used and then adopted by the Nazis in their propaganda against the jews and the foreign press.

Now, Lügenpresse is used to increase engagement and? is fed to the AI, without neither monitoring nor regulation, and just thinking of the consequences. No need to look further than the latest EU Parliamentary elections, so the question is “Do you really trust corporations to prevent data bias?”

3. Cyber Trucks

Cult of Personality is a term, that describes blindly following and idolizing a charismatic leader with no regard to the truth

I loved how Jordan Klepper at the daily show questioned Trump supporters, and their misguided yet honest answers

And if you think, that cult personality followers need to be from the less fortunate, a look at Cyber truck buyers hurting their fingers showcasing their new trucks, is all you need to see to understand that it works on anyone

AI nowadays in IT is slowly turning into a cult of personality, with anyone challenging it ethically, socially or even technologically is a homoerectus that’s definitely missing out on the new world.

4. Influencar-acy?

Do you remember that loser at work? Or that friend who never worked a day in their life? Well they are influencers now, teaching everyone how to do a job they never spent a day doing themselves.

We all have that Guru, a few seconds browsing of LinkedIn and you definitely will catch a post or two from a Guru in your field, whom you are sure NEVER did that job in their entire life.

You will also definitely see a new phenomenon of this century, a lot of repetitive videos, posts following the same trend, same content yet by different people.

I miss the old days, where you can actually learn from someone with talent, read creative content by someone who is actually talented, or watch some art done by brilliant artists.

But how do we define creativity?

I had that interesting conversation with a friend of mine, he strongly believes that creativity is the ability of a person to arrange thoughts, ideas, images, etc together to create something new. He believes AI can do the same thing, and better as it stores way more data points and is capable of analyzing it at faster rate, and at some point in the future, they will exceed our capability in processing data.

My argument was, the ability of Microbes with no nuclei to package their DNA to evolve to live inside other microbes as organelles for them, from this relation Mitochondria was evolved, Organic life is too brilliant that cannot be replicated by programmed machines.?

Humanity is all about innovation and empathy, existing from nothing rather than a microbe and innovating all the time with the need to make their lives easier and better, and even if AI reaches intelligence levels that replicates, or even exceeds our creating, it will never have the empathy, that we have through our unique existence.

Not to dive too much into chemistry and biology, I had only one question to my friend, what will happen when every word is generated by AI?

There will be no need for humans to do anything, no need to read, write, or create!

We saw many artists complaining how AI is generating art they did create which raises multiple ethical questions and to me that’s worse than being in a zoo, even if we created the zoo ourselves.

At the end, don’t get me wrong, I love me some ChatGPT doing unnecessary admin tasks that will take me ages to compile together, I love how AI can be applied to more useful use cases in medicine, machinery.

We all want an assistant, not a replacement

but I will never be excited about AI created by Corporations whose main aim is to generate money using data that is biased against almost everyone, create the sense of FOMO for everyone and ending human creativity, until these questions are answered … I will remain skeptical

P.S: Please no more Ads about courses for AI prompts and tools