This is a submission for the Future Writing Challenge: How Technology Is Changing Things.
The latest version of AI is everywhere. You might have heard it called Generative AI, or LLMs. And you've been told that it will take your job, or this is Skynet, and there won't be any jobs for your children. And anyway everything they're learning in school is useless. You're scared, I know.
This isn't the first AI revolution. You might remember when Kasparov lost a chess tournament to a computer. Or when Alexa was released and could understand most of what you said, and get things very wrong elsewhere. Just like autocorrect on your phone.
And that's really what this is. It's an autocorrect that understands that most people who type Taylor then type Swift, that lots of people have pictures of cats, so it can predict what a picture of a cat can look like.
But it isn't a decision or a reasoning engine, despite what the marketing money says. And there's still far more humans in the loop than you've been told. The party trick is built on huge amounts of energy - just look at how much money OpenAI loses - and huge amounts of human capital in places where labour is cheap. Categorising pictures, filtering out uncommercial content (not just nsfw but anything that might be controversial enough to scare advertisers).
Meanwhile those same people are wildly underrepresented in the outputs of these models. Because when all your input is WEIRD (White, Educated,...) then so will you output be. Because internet life, like popular culture it grew on, is still heavily biased.
The future isn't AI suppressing us, it's the billionaires using AI to reinforce bias and undermine labour power. But whilst they misdirect us by looking to an AI that doesn't exist, they can continue to exploit the rest of us (and the marginalized most of all) without oversight. And without respecting our privacy, or our copyright, or our humanity.
The future will have more AI, but a future run by AI is a future that won't be a future for the majority of humans. The time will pass, and we can help it pass, and technology still has a big role to help our future, but only if we remember that we are in control. A future where more technology is controlled under laws like GDPR, where companies are controlled and monopolies are harder to form, and a future where technology might help us connect but doesn't meditate our social life. Be defiantly human, and make technology work for you, not the other way round.
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