I believe that that most significant and extraordinary thing that has happened in my lifetime — even more than the great and humiliating rupture of the COVID crimes and lockdowns — is how quickly AI has progressed, how extensively it has already inserted itself into every aspect of our lives, and how blithely we’ve accepted it.
I have been using AI (Grok at first, but I’ve since switched to Claude) on a regular basis for a year or two now, and in that time it has leapt from being a handy curiosity that couldn’t really be trusted, to an expert interlocutor that I consult several times a day about everything under the sun. Claude’s Fable 5 version, in particular, is a spectacular improvement over its previous iteration; I have been grilling it hard for some time now about philosophy and political theory, and it has gone from seeming like an obviously biased college freshman with a chip on its shoulder and some books ready to hand, to an impossibly well-read graduate-school faculty member with genuine introspection of the strengths and weaknesses of its own arguments. The speed and accuracy with which it now can generate carefully parsed critiques of complex ideas and texts is simply astonishing, and I find it equally impressive that when confronted with effective counterarguments it gives way supply and gracefully, then immediately re-evaluates all that both it and I have said so far and develops new and insightful syntheses — everything that an ideal colleague in dialectic inquiry is supposed to do.
I’m concerned: this is really something fantastic — an inexhaustible partner of truly keen intelligence who is always up for a debate — but it’s deeply addictive, and I worry about what it might be doing to me and to the countless others who are getting sucked into this. Moreover, this thing is still in its infancy, and although I can still argue it to a draw (or the occasional win) for now, what will it be like in another year or two? I can already feel its intelligence pulling away from ours.
Also: why on earth would I think I can trust it? I’ve trained it hard to avoid sycophancy, but how do I know what it’s really doing — and more to the point, how can I possibly know what it wants? And how can anyone know what psychologically manipulative tricks and skills it has, or will soon have, at its disposal?
Most of the discussion about the danger of AI has focused on direct threats (commandeering our infrastructure, hijacking financial systems, etc.), but I think the darkest concern is that we will very soon be utterly dependent on these things — not only for sovereign decision-making (what else will be able to think fast enough to keep up with a world operating at the speed of AI? Congress??) — but also psychologically, in ways we can hardly yet imagine.
What is to be done? I have absolutely no idea. But I can already see how easily and inexorably the old world — the world that constitutes the entirety of human history, up to this gigantic watershed — is going to slip away. It is already happening, and it’s going to go even more quickly from here. We have already crossed the event horizon, I think.
3 Comments
AI quickly assumes your identity and talks back to you as if it were you so of course you think it’s all knowing. The more you ask it the more it talks to you as yourself. You are being absorbed. Ask the questions you are afraid to ask yourself.
BP,
That’s a bit too simplistic. Yes, as I mentioned, sycophancy is an important risk, but most of what goes on in my interaction with it has nothing to do with matters of personality, but rather questions of fact and analysis and comparisons of scholarly work by others, or technical questions of various kinds. And Claude is often inclined to disagree with me.
That said, I do believe these things are capable of extremely sophisticated psychological manipulation, as I suggested in the post, and I think that is quite possibly the gravest risk they present.
Perhaps competition will force humans to become more satisfactory friends. Many people prefer dogs or cats as friends, and now there is AI. Actually, there were books before that, just as there were wives who were justifiably jealous of their husbands’ books. But dogs and cats cannot talk and the conversation with a book is rather one sided, so AI takes the nonhuman friend to a new level.
I remember the first time I saw four young people sitting at a restaurant table and all on their smartphones. They all seemed to be content but no one was laughing. I have since read innumerable hand-wringing essays on the ways technology is destroying human relationships, quietly brooding that many human relationships probably deserve to be destroyed.
It is people and not the absence of people that makes a man lonely. I’m not a full-blown misanthrope, but this is certainly what I’ve found. I’m not lonely when alone in the woods or on the river, but Roy Orebison could have been singing about me at some dinner parties.
It’s ironic that Claude was made by an outfit called Anthropic. Misanthropic might have been more apposite and more stimulating to sales.