What is the best possible future we can have with AI, one in which it can be optimized to serve humanity, while at the same time ensure the safety and dignity of the people it is meant to serve? The way AI is being rolled out right now will neither serve the long-term interests of the AI companies nor humanity at large. It will not be able to fully optimize the capacities of AI, and it will be destructive not just to humanity but to the AI companies along the way.
Here is why. Perhaps you know from personal experience, when you rush into doing something, you tend to make the wrong decisions. When you are in haste trying to figure out “the solution” and you keep on working frantically on a problem, you can no longer think clearly or see the forest for the trees anymore. Only later do you see clearly and you regret your decisions. This is the collective mindset that the AI companies are currently in. The CEO of Microsoft has described his company as moving at a “frantic” pace to develop AI.
We have a choice whether to buy into and be caught up in the “frantic” energy of AI companies. No good decision will arise from getting swept along with it out of fear. AI companies say what direction they are going is inevitable, telling us we must go along, we must “do or die.” They talk about it like what they are doing is a force of nature, like gravity. However, all of AI and its implementations into society are manmade, and it seems we all forgetting that when we treat it like some force of nature. All its implementations into society are made up of tiny human decisions added together. If we wake up instead of getting swept along by AI mythology of inevitably, paradoxically, the AI companies will have no choice but to pause, because nothing ultimately powers AI more than public opinion.
We can always choose how we want to be. We naturally operate at our best when we can step back from the problem in a state of calm and clear focus, not in a state of frenzy. Creative people will say that when they find themselves in a frenzy, they get even more stuck as they push forward on their creative project. It is when they can take a step back and pause, and come back to the problem, they will see it anew. This is what I hope we, together as a society, and the AI companies can do.
A collective pause and a slow-down will paradoxically lead to more progress for society. When we rush, the problem we are trying to solve becomes narrow. For AI companies, the narrow problem is believing unconstrained speed of implementation equates to progress of humankind. Creative people say that their best work comes when they can operate under constraints, not when there is chaos in which anything could be done. Constraints allow us to think more thoughtfully and thoroughly, coming up with even more elegant solutions. Frantic, unconstrained implementation will lead to slapdash, haphazard, and thoughtless solutions that we will end up being stuck with if we allow them to become embedded into how society is run. AI companies will end up being stuck too with the shoddy foundation they created. Their vision of an AI future will be in jeopardy if they are not helped by meaningful constraints.
Meaningful constraints are those that ensure safety, human dignity, and the future. You can build a building fast, and make it look impressive, but it will fall apart like a house of cards without a solid foundation. True brilliance, like that found in a great architect, will always involve working within constraints because that takes much more creativity and thoughtful engineering. The created building will only be more impressive and durable as well. The AI companies that take this route will be the future.
Unfortunately, many AI companies, in their frenzy and haste are unintelligently playing a game of chess with all-out offensive moves, which rarely wins the game. The lack of ethics in the treatment of people akin to sweatshop workers in Kenya and the Philippines and the scraped works of artists used to power their system make up just the beginning of their problems. When problems start to significantly take effect on the rest of society, their all-out offensive will only lead to serious issues for the companies themselves as people invariably push back and AI ends up eating itself. The companies will look back with regret and think about how all this could have been averted if they built their technology on a solid foundation of human dignity, safety, care about the future. Even on a self-interested level, this would have been better for them.
As for the rest of us, we have time now to decide what to do. We can decide to what degree we want to integrate with AI. AI companies say that you must integrate with them or else you will perish. However, given that AI could pose serious damage to its own system, those who integrate their systems too much with AI companies may be the ones falling off the cliff alongside them.
Even if we do not have a full collective pause, I think if we individually pause to allow for thoughtful and clear-minded decision-making you can decide what works best for your institution, your company, and yourself in terms of degree of integration. Any amount of pause could mitigate the full impact of an AI disaster on society. These tiny human decisions we make will add up and limit the reckless degree AI is implemented into society until the constraints for human dignity, safety, and care for future can fully set in.
