AI ISN'T A PROBLEM. WE ARE.

I have no concerns about AI. It’s the laziness of human beings that worries me. Laziness may not be the right word; it’s humanity’s historical drive to reap more for less effort. As Grose put it, in his 1785 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, “Lazy people frequently take up more than they can safely carry, to save the trouble of coming (back)?a second time.”

#AI is, in fact, the direct descendent of the wheel and the plough. The product of ingenious beings thinking “Hang on, there must be an easier way - to plant more seeds, to reap a bigger harvest – than just me and my family digging up the ground. Servants are all very well, but I have to pay them. Slaves could do it but I still have to feed them. I’ll?make?something that’s pulled by a couple of oxen, maybe, and dig up fields in no time. “?

The whole so-called civilizing process follows this cycle: to reap more with less effort. The wheel, the plough, electricity, transport and ‘electronic communication’ all reap more for the owners of the “tools” for less of their physical effort.

The modernization of armaments and warfare charts the same course: literally, more bang for the buck. Less physical engagement, fewer casualties for me and more damage to the enemy. And, of course, less empathy and very little thought of the reality on the ground.

And, since our primary motive for innovation is to do less for more gain, we increasingly leave the thinking to our technology and to the controllers of that technology. We say to ourselves that we do that so that we can think about more important things. But perhaps we are just becoming more lazy.?

Electricity is an essential part of our lives, but how many of us can build a simple light bulb – let alone harness and generate electrical power??Both my father and my older brother could strip a car and put it back together again. When they tried to teach me to do the same thing, I learnt the invaluable trick of falling asleep on my feet. The difference between us was that they had to; I didn’t. Both of them had lived in remote areas where the nearest repair garage was 100 miles away. I was born and brought up in a town.??I learned to drive a car but had little idea of how it worked. In fact, put me in a time machine and take me back 300 years, I wouldn’t be much of an asset to our ancestors – other than to tell them insane stories of light bulbs, internets, and drones.?

The 4 stages of progressive ignorance

As innovation accelerates, creative thinking – or perhaps our confidence in our own thinking – has been going into reverse - into what I call the 4 stages of progressive ignorance. The first stage is when we Google something we don’t know. The second stage is when we forget what we have Googled as soon as we have used it. Why retain the information when you can just look it up when you need it again? The third stage of ignorance is simply accepting what we find as fact, without checking for additional evidence. And now, we are in the fourth stage: accepting opinions and claims on (mostly) social media as “truth”.

This laziness has long pervaded the established news media as well. How many times have you seen an almost identically worded story in multiple newspapers or sites? All of them sourced from press releases. How many times have you seen them use a comment or comments on Twitter (or wherever)??to reinforce the validity of a story???As if vociferous support by 1,000 or even 50, 000 angry subscribers is evidence of guilt or innocence: or of fact.?

So, now we have #chatgpt4 . And??#llama . And #chatsonic .?And, apparently, they are not only omniscient, not only can they think for us, but they can also?write?what they think for us. And of course, the next step is they’ll execute what they think for us: make cars, build houses, make laws, punish and reward us. Tell us when to breed, bleed or need.?

Oh dear.?There’ll be no point in us.

And neither should there be if we persist in giving ourselves away; in sub-contracting our powers to others – to the makers of tools and the tools themselves. Because it’s not AI that will control us but the feeders of AI. It wasn’t the algorithms that created the banking collapse in 2008. It wasn’t even the quants who fed in the data and made the calculations, it was the assumptions that were insisted upon by traders and salesman and their managers. And it is assumptions that will weaponize the data that AI mines.?

So, it’s not AI we should worry about. It’s our laxity in not thinking, in not questioning assumptions in day-to-day life: in being too ready to accept that an opinion or news report we like is actually true; in being too lazy to question “fact” from wherever it is sourced. For being too focused on reaping more for less effort.?

In return for less mental and physical effort we give away experience. We jettison our direct experience of ourselves living and managing the world with our fellow beings, that delivers relationships and learning.?Isn’t our Facebook community part of our world? Absolutely, but it is a very limited and distorted part of our world. It’s the shadows in Plato’s cave. It’s Susan Sontag’s moment captured in a photograph. The people we encounter there are momentary symbols of themselves. Your friends on Facebook, Twitter and TikTok are not your friends – unless you really believe that you can form a close bond with someone whom you only know in bursts of short sentences or carefully posed selfies and videos.?

So, as I said, it’s not AI that concerns me. AI is the great grandchild??of the plough. It’s the laziness of human beings that worries me.??In our drive for more bang for the buck, we are increasingly sub-contracting our relationship with our world, mentally, physically and emotionally, and are now so lacking in confidence in our immense capabilities that we think AI - a product of our own genius – can render us obsolete.

#aiethics #aichatbots #facebook #linkedin #thinkingskills #laziness #assumptions Association for Coaching (AC) 美国哈佛商学院 Debora Spar Adam Grant