I
heard a radio advert this morning that has disturbed me a little. I'm guessing
it's about a new version of AI on a mobile phone. I didn't catch the whole
thing, but the bit that fell into my ears clearly and set off a bit of an alarm
said, "If a friend asks you a question, and your phone knows the answer,
why not let your phone reply automatically?"
Personally, I can think of a lot of reasons why not...
I'm already noticing that there are several people I have regular dealings with
who use ChatGPT to write all their e-mails. It's obvious. It doesn't sound
anything like them, and the e-mails all follow a similar pattern and structure.
And I hate it. Artificial Intelligence has been put forward as this amazing
world-improving advancement and all we seem to be doing is making people lazy
by replacing simple tasks that shouldn't be too much bother. Do friends really
mean so little to each other that we are now happy to let our devices talk to
each other on our behalf? Is that friendship? Because you can be sure that the
next step with this is to take the individual person out of the process
completely. Very soon, there will be an advert that says something like,
"why bother asking any questions when your phone knows you well enough to
ask it for you automatically?" We'll just end up in a state where we make
no decision whatsoever, we just respond to what our mobile devices prompt us to
do. It's scary, and it's the thing that old sci-fi books warned us about, and
it's not that far away in the future. In fact, we're already on the path to it
now, and we're allowing it to happen. It frightens me, and devastates me, and I
dearly hope there might be a possibility that I can go and live on an island
sometime soon with a group of people who are determined to avoid it. We'll set
up a happy commune where we talk to each other verbally and make decisions
together, and ignore the wider world and it's slide into cataclysm.
But I'll still want a telly there to watch the NFL, obviously.
RC 24-9-25
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