We get so excited about all the advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) from companies and developments like Chatbot and generative AI. This is a new and exciting opportunity for investors, workers, governments and individuals. That being said, there are two sides to every coin. While this may indeed help mankind reach new levels, the other side of the coin means it also dulls us down. That, along with other dangers mean we need to stay on top of AI and make sure it doesn’t get away from us because we can lose control.
There have been many potential problems that have been written about with generative AI and the Chatbot fever that seems to be infecting everyone.
Problems like invasion of our privacy and giving us deceptive information with false answers, news and images are real issues. And we are just at the start of this next adventure.
AI needs to be unbiased, so it won’t be harmful to society
That means step-by-step, this could quickly get away from us and we lose control. That’s what we need to be aware of an protect ourselves from. We need to create a solid, healthy, growing new space.
If we don’t remain in control, we will regret it.
You see, today AI is only as smart as the human beings who write its program or code. That means it starts out with a set of assumption about life which can be one sided. Not a good, balanced place to start.
Like it or not, we need the complexity of varied points of view to make society strong, fair, unbiased and good.
The problem comes with new technologies like generative AI which can write its own code going forward and Chatbots.
Left unchecked, this could become a disaster for the natural and healthy development of our society.
Generative AI has potential for both good and bad at same time
Example, we have already seen many AI photographs of President Donald Trump getting arrested. The problem is this is fiction. It has not happened. Yet, that does not stop the creativity of people using AI technology to impact and influence our world for better and for worse.
This is just one sample of how AI can influence the direction and flow of our civilization. There are countless others.
We must realize that when we change the direction of one thought, countless thoughts that follow will also be changed. And that’s where the real danger lies.
Another important issue is how new technology dulls us. It keeps us from learning. Any new technology is thought to improve our lives. However, the fear is as it improves our lives, it will also make us lazy and eventually unable to think and solve problems ourselves.
In that case, what happens when the power goes down? And it will.
How AI technology can dull us and dumb us down
Consider the smartphone. The Apple iPhone and Google Android smartphones, apps and wireless data have given us so much. However, they have also taken much away. They have dulled us down. Too many of us can no longer understand basic things we all previously knew.
When I was a child in school, we were not allowed to use calculators during tests. We had to learn math. Today, things are changing. Today, children use calculators on tests and have not mastered math. Not learning the intricacies of math impacts our learning curve going forward.
What about reading a map to find your way around? With the Navigation apps, today many of us no longer remember how to get where they are going. Today, too many of us simply follow along on the on-screen directions.
That lack of learning means we never advance. Instead, we become dependent on tech.
AI Chatbots, ChatGPT, GPT-4, Bard can both wow us and dumb us down
As you can see, technology like AI can both wow us with advancements and betray us by causing us to dumb down, all at the same time.
This concern should be top of mind as we move forward into this new and unknown space. We love this new technology. We love how it can improve our lives. How it will instantly make us better, smarter and stronger.
However, if we use AI, we don’t need to learn things or do things on our own.
And that’s a real problem. If we use AI and don’t learn how to learn, it will dull our senses and make the human species weaker than before, not stronger.
Boiling this growing problem down to a comic strip, there is a cartoon making its way around Twitter. You may have seen it. It says, “AI turns a single bullet point into a long email I can pretend I wrote.” It also says, “AI makes a single bullet point out of this long email I can pretend I read.”
That is why we must strike a balance. We must use new technology like AI to make us better, smarter and stronger, not the other way around.
AI will be with us forever. So, let’s be smart as we implement this new technology into every part of our lives. We must remain in control. We must never get so infatuated with the new tech that we lose ourselves in it.
AI has the potential to improve our lives. It also has the potential to wreck out civilization. So, we must continually work to keep the balance, to benefit from, to remain in control and not get lost in all the noise.