Today’s increasing adoption of artificial intelligence follows an infatuated and child-like fascination with technology that makes one reminiscent of the first humans that invented the wheel. While seemingly obvious and evident, the rampant adoption and integration of Artificial Intelligence, the underlying machine learning and deep learning technologies as well as the developer and computer scientists that work with the mathematics, endangers technology in a contorted way. Although, A.I is the next frontier in the advancement of technology, it is proving to a be a large problem and “catch-phrase”. Many companies seem to focus on their implementation of Artificial Intelligence and the integration of their product with previously generated data. Glorified Statistics, as one may call it, Artificial Intelligence holds truly dangerous problems at heart.
But first, we need to clarify what Artificial Intelligence is. Does Artificial Intelligence imply the ability to create? Does Artificial Intelligence imply the ability to innovate? Does it imply consciousness? Does it imply sentience? Or does it simply mean that an equation learnt how to be its most true value based on previous calculations, data and inputs? If such is the case, then how are we any different?
Abstract existentialist crises aside, technological innovations should be defined in a much more distinct fashion. The implementation of the laws of physics, in such a way that is engineered to make doing something easier, is a reductive yet good starting point. The fact that we need to optimize our carbon-footprint in such a way that makes survival possible yet rapes the planet twice over, is a fact that we have to live with. Deviant portrayal of sexual tendencies of the human-kind as a whole aside, perfecting the art of creating a carbon-footprint is engineering. Whereas technology is much more than the simple arrangement of mechanical and physical elements to optimize the use of energy. Technology requires conviction, a mature sense of responsibility and debate of existence over essence. Technology serves the carnal and innate need for man to innovate.
Stemming from this, the point should be clear, a business management system that connects to the multiple instances of your mySQL databases, running on machines that put out hundreds of kilograms of carbon-dioxide in a month, so that you can ask an AI about how a certain sales pipeline worked is not AI. Interpretation of data, to either pander a confirmation bias, or to understand data that is already present, requires the integrity to go over the figures yourself.
Well, then is generative AI a technological advancement? The answer is nuanced. And reductively, no. For reasons that go beyond philosophy and literature, it is simple that generative AI is not an advancement. It is, although an achievement, that we can make computers come close to human ingenuity.
So, it is clear then, the current AI is the norm. It WAS the next frontier. It is a very basic norm now. It is at the very least the, a default. The furor it has caused in the industry, the widespread “fan-boying” and hopeless romanticization of engineers that can abstract the calculations taught in a 2-semester calculus sequence into programs to satisfy a business function, is irrational. From a utilitarian perspective, a person who cleans data and makes it understandable is not much different than a sorting machine in waste disposal facility, and in the objective sense of this article, should be treated as such, they should be automated.
An additional point of consideration is the argument that AI saves time and revenue. Well, what do you do with the additional resources then? Do you maximize your profits, or do you use these funds to feed the hungry? Do you use the extra electricity you saved and export it to a region that is not electrified? But altruism and charity are secure when the effects are deterministic. Let’s talk about deterministic results of the very evolution of technology ahead. What comes next? Now that you can make a slice of silicon talk and think, what next?
While we shamelessly capitalize and base our existence, profits, militaries and economies on diminutively minor improvements in technology, we seem to forget that there lies a bigger world at hand.
The decade’s technological landscape follows a pattern that is far more shameless. It is result-centric, innovation and efficiency agnostic, completely focused on marginalizing the evolution of technology and maximizing economic, shareholder and financial benefit while ignoring basic laws of physics, sustainment of nature as well as patronizing the end user, by downplaying the subtle yet foundational innovation of engineers that developed the technology a decade ago, but was held back and released much later in a watered down version so as to maximize profits and create a twisted sense of value over generational leaps.
Although the mass consumer and “pro-sumer” markets do not contribute to the highest sales values they do account for extremely large proportions of emissions, pollution and recurring patterns of use and volumetric usage that stand to damage the impact of true innovation and engineering in the long term as well as impacting the environment and the planet in a subtle yet drastic way in a rapid fashion. The layers of abstraction and technology that are added over a simple web-application today increase electrical consumption and create additional semiconductor usage, that will in the end, cause a larger exodus of e-waste than previously seen. A simple ERP or CRM system has over 20 JavaScript libraries, python back-ends and multiple levels of virtualization and abstraction on the operating system and kernel level. The innovation to improve these factors may have been made by the very company a decade ago, but as the arbitrage of features goes away, minor “improvements” will be released to create a far larger profit ratio than it would have when it was developed.
The need to reiterate this becomes evident as we see that previously assumed free markets have turned into oligopolies that are far less driven to innovate than before. Furthermore, focusing on user-experience and interfaces as well as extrapolating intelligence from data has added a yard stick that was, previously much closer to pure technological perfection. The causes for these are simple to see, from companies like Intel and Nvidia to recently, AMD, all have capitalized on their portrayal of innovation while hiding their true intent of just trying to make money. Technological idealism and its adjunct altruism where work and development and research is result and profit agnostic, innovation and optimization focused with an intention to consolidate and minimize the tech stack so as to integrate various fabrication and lithography methods to create more standardized and efficient processors that will result much more integrated technology stacks that do not require 50 million lines of import and a trillion seconds to compile, are truly lacking in this world. And this will soon result in an apocalypse that causes tremendous upheaval either in daily human life or maybe even come into the way of survival itself.
Existence before essence is a paradox that seems to enlighten the more and more often one thinks about it. Sartre used it, defined it and elaborated on it, to satisfy his philosophical arguments of human autonomy, human thought and human ingenuity. His principles are the foundation for a very neo-grotesque school of thought that put obnoxiously increasing importance on us very humans, taking away from theistic and principled logic and super-powers. It is a contorted portrayal of cynicism and craziness, when looked at from a historical standpoint yet in line, with every principle after the God is Dead proclamation.
In similar fashion, technological existence is an important factor to consider. It is important to consider the subtle hint of thought that, Technology is the sixth element of nature. It is important to consider and pontificate over the extreme power and capabilities we bear when we harness it. As fire and water and our ways to harness them became efficient, optimized and perfected over millennia, we need to consider the notion that technology is not an appropriate element to be guarded and held by the chains of money and the seemingly “free, free market”. Obviously, this isn’t a call for a socialist and communist view of technology, we already do that with open-source, and somehow it points towards the shortfalls of technology and communism, both, at the same time. As time goes on, and we reach Utopia, we need to find a better way to approach technology, to make it, harness it and immortalize it.
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