AI: Our New Gods

So I jump onto social media and my feed is flooded with so many conversations about AI, and how copywriters will be replaced by AI.

Well... eventually. But not today.

Although I did learn a few days ago that there are copywriters that are using tools like FunnelScripts and Jarvis to generate copy for them, and then selling them starting at $5k to their clients.

Good business? On one hand I question the ethics, but on the other hand if it resolves the clients problem... it's like the story of the tradesperson who charged $5k for solving a problem in 30 seconds because he knew where to hit the hammer.

I personally haven't come across anything in the AI world generates copy that I would consider acceptable, and some months ago we did some research into this and published our findings in an article.

As I said... eventually. But not today.

In my mind, it's not about whether AI will replace copywriters or graphic designers...

It's about what is really possible beyond that.

Now, I had the good fortune to be involved in this area about 10 years ago with one of the giants of innovation in Silicon Valley. I got to see just how powerful AI could be in various industries from health, to exploration, to entertainment - and I got to really understand it intimately from a data perspective.

• Imagine plowing through 120,000 emails in 24 hours to understand their context - not their content - and then deducing whether a corporation had committed a laudable crime.
• Imagine voice inflection of an irate customer being analysed so that a call centre IVR will automatically escalates a call based on the qualitative data it receives.
• Or going through a differential diagnosis of multiple diseases and shortlisting the most likely in moments, not hours.
• Or a social media platform aggregating billions of pieces of user sentiment to determine how best to present a presidential candidate's campaign.

These are all use cases of actual work that I was connected to 10 years ago. It was pretty cool then... and it was awe inspiring of what else is possible.

What is clear is that the computational power of a machine is ridiculously faster than that of the logical human mind.

It is only a matter of time before many of our basic logical functions are replaced by machines.

This is inevitable.

Our emotional functions are also now being dictated by machines - serving content and advertising to us based on words they hear, search history, engagement patterns - most people are aware that we're being profiled and fed information and most of the time we accept it as normal.

I learnt that this was something that PR and propaganda pioneer Edward Bernays had predicted would happen back in the 1920s, except in his prophecy it was going to be governments not corporations.

His prediction is not far off, because it could be argued that corporations are the new governments... but that's a rabbit hole...

Earlier this week I finished reading the book "Everything is F*cked" by Mark Manson. It's the follow up to "The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck". Both are well worth reading as they break down and show how to apply the principles of non-attachment in today's world. They both also take a good look into the values structures that people have adopted and also the existential inevitability of our human condition.

Anyway... before I go down another rabbit hole on that, let's get back on track...

So in one of the later chapters of "Everything is F*cked", Manson takes us down a path of enquiry.

What happens when AI starts writing AI...?

It could go completely "Skynet" and destroy us... which many people think we're doing that to ourselves anyway... AI would just expedite the process.

Or it could end up being the new Gods that we worship.

If you've seen the series "American Gods" it shows that people are enamoured by the new pantheon of Gods that are Technology, Media, New Media and other modern phenomenon.

I haven't read the book by Neil Gaiman as yet TBH so I don't know how much more he covers.

Anyway... the point I'm making is that we're already worshiping at the altar of our new saviours.

Imagine walking around in a perpetually virtual environment which looks much better than real life. I mean society is already doing that with AR, VR, mixed realities and even the chronic addiction to social media.

Then imagine that we are kept there while in real life the AI Gods are reshaping the world to either support us, annihilate us (Terminator), or use us as a resource (The Matrix).

There's a concept in the Dharmic philosophies of called "maya" - a dream-like state or a veil of illusion. A shared hallucination of what the world is, when in actual fact it's not that at all.

Maybe the AI Gods will just present to us a new layer of "maya".

Whatever it may be, it's fascinating, potentially scary, and can be both utopian and dystopian simultaneously.

I think it's also an inevitability.

AI's writing copy and taking my work away is only a miniscule piece of that, and frankly, the least of my concern.

(AI contributed to the creation of this post)