On the Matter of Inhumanity

 On the Matter of Inhumanity

I feel the time has come to set out my stall on the ever growing issue of AI and its use in society. And my stall is very simple.

I HATE it.

Why so dramatic a statement you may ask? Surely it’s just a harmless tool to aid in creativity and productivity? But as someone who lives her life positively vibrating with frustration at the injustices and unkindnesses of modern society, what I see is something that heavily magnifies both. Let me explain.

I shall start with injustice. A very basic fact of AI that people seem to forget is that is draws its knowledge from pre-existing information that it has been fed. Everything it creates and produces is taken from previous human endeavour – but often, it has been taken without the permission or even the knowledge of the original creators and is now being used to undercut and undermine their own ability to make a living by creating free knock off copies of their work.

And worse, much worse – it is even being used to replace them. There is already talk of AI authored screenplays and scripts in the film and TV industry. AI art is being used instead of hiring artists. Genuine human creativity is being pushed aside in favour of an easy, cheap alternative. And it isn’t just the creative industries that are being affected – ordinary, straightforward jobs are being pushed out of existence by it too. I’m sure we’ve all suffered the “joys” of interacting with a customer services chatbot, as it stonewalls and blocks you from actually being able to get anywhere with a total lack of compassion for you as a person.

And total lack of compassion brings me to unkindness. AI doesn’t care about people and sadly, that reflects a lot of modern profit driven society. People talk of an idealised society where computers do all the working and the thinking and we can just relax but do we really want to live in a world where existing as the unthinking, computer ruled blob people from WALL-E is the best case scenario? A bunch of lazy humans who never trouble their brains in any way, shape or form?

And knowing the selfish, money-ruled nature of modern existence, I don’t believe that “best case” is what would actually happen. Far more likely is that AI will simply put vast numbers of people out of a job and massively increase poverty and destitution in the name of saving money for business. But these businesses lack vision for where do they think their profits will come from when half the world is unemployed? And more, the world of business and indeed often these days of politics seem to view people as commodities to be used and mined or as a source of profit or custom, but not cared about or looked after as people and to quote the late, great Terry Pratchett “Evil begins when you treat people as things.”

Because AI represents the ultimate in inhumanity. Not just in and of itself, but allowing and enabling humans themselves to behave in inhumane ways with far greater ease. It is speeding up loss of the simple fact that what matters is society is not ease of existence or how much profit one can rake in, but PEOPLE. Human creativity is far more valuable that anything a computer can cook up from the scraps their endeavours. The quality of human existence is far more important than any amount of money. Caring about other humans should not be pushed aside in favour of protecting a profit margin. And these basic truths are getting increasingly lost. And AI is, as mentioned, magnifying the ability of other humans to lose them.

At the end of the day, I know AI is just a tool. My issue is the inhumanity of those who will make use of it and what they will use it to do. And that is what I hate it for.