Selectively Juggling

Aspects of AI are undoubtedly life changing. As a parent of a child with a rare disease and disabilities I relish the ingenuity, research and development, the knowledge that researchers and scientists are able to extend and expand the realms of their research. AI enables researchers to tap into new terrain, expedite models and entertain new concepts, ideas and possibilities.

As a professional tasked with assessing individuals, analysing and generating professional reports AI provides an almost cognitive assistance. I can task it with a load of demands, parameters, data, findings, and requirements . AI acts as an executive assistant who is gifted in preventing my cognitive overload. Or more acutely, it’s like cloning myself and having additional cognitive space to achieve my goals. Personally, using Copilot enables me to outsource the repetitive administrative tasks, while freeing up and protecting my creative energies and abilities needed to sustain higher order thinking. I am the pilot tasking my AI offsider with the demands, or source code. I hone, cull, edit, evaluate the AI’s output – I review, analyse, tweak and perfect, making corrections, checking for inaccuracy and redundancies. In this way AI acts as an external processing space where I grow and further develop my own skills. As a highly visual person this process allows me to extend my own capabilities and creativity. Copilot becomes like a cognitive mirror where I see my ideas and thoughts reflected back at me. I then am tasked with ensuring that the reflected image has clarity or flawed with inaccuracy or delusions.

AI should NOT be owned and controlled by trillionaires. AI should not be the newest form of colonialism, where data mining is used to displace and dispossess swathes of humanity.

AI has the potential to create incredible human growth and development. It has the potential to help eradicate disease and suffering, of creating new systems which extend human life.

Yet AI does present inherent risks and challenges. If you looked at AI as a organic creation, then you can easily imagine that if you are feeding it on hate, greed, fear, violence and indifference, then it’s going to morph into a socially and emotionally malnourished and much maligned creature. Conversely if it is fed using the best of humanity’s gifts, of wonder, curiosity, hope, insight, care, compassion, empathy for humanity, and the wisdom that comes from learning about and from past human suffering, loss and incursions, then it has the potential to be well nourished, emotionally intelligent and capable of balancing conflicting concepts and demands. We are creating the beast, we are ultimately responsible for whether it turns and bites us, or whether it moves with us in our collective existence.

AI is fantastical, remarkable and exciting. AI is frightening, concerning and quite literally an unknown entity. AI is here, regardless of which side of the aisle we stand. Is it possible to remove ourselves from the grid? Is it possible to avoid using AI? Is it possible to minimise the footprint of AI? Is it possible to protect aspects of humanity that can’t be replaced or replicated? Our creative drive, our personal human experiences and vulnerabilities that help create art, community and humanity? is humanity’s collective conscience able to hold its focus for more than a few AI generated memes and gifs at a time? Should we try and prevent AI generated art, music and creative processes? Ensuring we safeguard the very essence of human creativity?

There most definitely needs to be checks and balances, especially given the environmental degradation and violence associated with AI and Data Centres. The inordinate amount of water required to feed these dystopian plants, is wreaking havoc and harm. The fact that trillionaires and multi billionaires are able to further rape and pillage whole communities in their hungry quest to win the AI race.

I do think humanity’s attention span has shrunk and we are becoming reliant on byte sized chunks of entertainment, stimulation and information. The animated movie WALL-E captures what I see as our growing dependency on consumption of AI and our loss of critical consciousness. We need to retain our humanity, while simultaneously work with and harness the benefits of AI. We cannot give AI open tenure in our lives, it needs to be contained and constantly checked and balanced.