The Importance of Human Thought

 The Importance of Human Thought 

With apologies to all those in favour of it, I’m going to have a rant about my issues with Artificial Intelligence again. But this is something that isn’t going to go away and I fear that, as so often with the human race, it is something we are plunging into without thinking about the consequences.

Because the major consequence, if we aren’t careful, will be to crush our ability for creative thought by giving it all to a computer.

I think I can speak for many when I saw that jobs that don’t involve brain work are not very stimulating. Mindlessly copying or inputting data into a computer, repetitive tasks – this is work that pays bills but doesn’t ignite passion or indeed brain cells. Where jobs become interesting, where people become enthused, is where thought is involved – analysis, diagnosis, assessment, creativity, imagination, problem solving, projection, discovery, inspiration, whatever you want to call it, whatever kind of work it is and whatever form it takes, it is the spark in a working life.

AI has no spark because AI has no imagination. All its human qualities come from humans ourselves, artificially grafted on and input from existing human creativity to create an illusion of inspiration based on centuries of our brain work. But what it can do is simulate our ability to think and do so quickly, simulate our ability to create art, writing, music but soullessly and make life easy for those who did not previously have the capability of creating such things themselves.

So AI can replace human thought in a working capacity. But one thing it still needs is someone to mindlessly input the data. So if we aren’t very, very careful, we will end up leeching all of the joy and the passion out of working life by handing all the thinking to the computer and leaving ourselves with nothing to do but mindlessly feed it information. We will turn ourselves into the unthinking drudges letting the computers do all the fun part of existing for us. We’re only a few short steps away from being the human race as shown in the Disney film WALL-E – and that’s the best case scenario!

I am aware how melodramatic I must sound. But listening to the news talking about developing AI to create jobs – it will create short term jobs for computer specialists, but it will wipe out other, less specialised, people’s jobs altogether. Look at the Customer Service industry and how hard it is to get passed useless and uncaring chat bots pretending to be people to speak to an actual human being. It used to be people manning those helplines, what’s happened to them? Business will always replace people with cheaper software it doesn’t have to pay or worry about treating properly if it can. It will make it harder for those without good qualifications or specialist skills to find work. It will either take the jobs of those people or make them mindlessly dull. And I’m sorry to sound harsh but business will cheerfully let it if their profit margin increases.

We need to be careful at the moment – we are only a few steps away from crushing human creativity and taking all the small pleasure out of life for millions if not billions of people. And that isn’t a world I want to see.

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