Everything Artificial

The role of reality as we know it has evolved through history. And with technological interventions in human life, ecosystems around us have evolved to include the artificial as part of the real. And as many philosophers have tried to tackle, the definition of what is artificial has evolved too. In fact, on the other hand what we call real has changed.

We live in the great age of AI (Artificial Intelligence) and with the recent breakthrough artificialness is no longer limited to intelligence but has entered the realms of Creativity. In fact, with generative AI entering the arena, artificially generating language, meaning and image artefacts has become a matter of expression rather than skill. And as we see this technological age it will become a second nature of human life, like how we consider web search today.?I still remember the early days when sharing information post searching online was not always seen in positive light among academia. Original thought was celebrated more than reference-based ideas. We all have been there when we searched our ideas online just to realize someone somewhere is working on something similar. In fact, from my personal experience I do remember a student in one of my classes searching for keywords from the whiteboard and questioning my rationale around the same. While back then I might have gotten alarmed by this behavior, today i see the value of encouraging it since it evolves connected learning and fosters the passion of students to go down the rabbit hole to find something new as they learn.

The recent generative AI based evolutions are going to similarly become part of our day to day lives as we go beyond the initial surprise of its magical properties. While the tech gurus haven't coined fancy terms for Gen AI, I personally feel it could be labelled as Artificial Creativity. I know all the linguists out there are fuming by this aberrant use of words just to create jargon, but coming to think about it, that's exactly what the latest AI is doing. And in our journey of enabling the artificial, as humans after the invention of artificial strength and cognition, we have now started marching towards artificial creativity.

As early humans evolved their minds to think beyond what exists, we have seen in art revolutions how we went from realistic depictions of what is, to surrealist abstraction of what can be. Even in the arena of technology the same will be followed. After the realms of trying to automate mundane human tasks to even improvise them we have come a long way.

Trying to use technology to extend/ augment ourselves as humans beyond our capabilities has been the cornerstone of progressive technological innovation. However, we haven't stopped there and as humans we have gone into the realms of creating everything artificial which may or may not improvise our lives. While we as a species are intelligent enough to reverse create meaningful rationale for the invented technology, not always has our goal been to start with a purpose. French sociologist Jean Baudrillard in his famous work on post-modernist perceptions of reality, has clearly called this out. We are entering a phase of human civilization where the real and the artificial cannot be distinguished. We as humans have lost or will lose all ability to make sense of the distinction between nature and artifice. His work on simulacra back in 1981 continues to remain a seminal point of view on this topic. In fact, while the hype of metaverses might have dipped, the core abstraction around simulation remains to be an elusive truth as language models evolve to make conversations seem almost human like.

With Artificial Creativity this becomes even more a matter of us as humans adapting to the same. And as we head towards Artificial General AI, which some say will change the nature of human perception, we as humans would need to upgrade ourselves to accept this newly formed Artificial Reality.

As we proceed towards further replicating, super ceeding and losing ability to distinguish human traits like strength, beauty, creativity, intelligence etc. would we cross the barriers of artificial emotions and empathy? Would Artificial Emotions be the next revolution of technological brilliance?

Even today if some of our fellow humans fake an emotion or response to our inquiry or situation, we as humans cringe at calling that an act of deception. Would humans then allow technology to deceive us into believing that it feels genuinely about our condition? And even if we do can it then be used to generate or manipulate emotions in humans. Emotions like fear, sadness?

Maybe, it will take us time to reach the level of indistinguishable maturity when technology feels and empathizes with human emotions. Let me leave you with two questions to ponder upon:

How fast are we adapting and evolving to the fast-evolving artificial technological world around us?

How do we adopt these newer realms of artificialness into our constructed human reality?

What is real in the age of this impounding artificial reality and when do we lose our strength to distinguish the same?

____________________________________________________________

Thanks for reading. I love sharing my thoughts and opinions on this blog, but they are just my personal views and don’t represent the organization I work for.