Daily Times

With artificial intelligence, whether we end up ‘summoning the demon’ or elevating our lifestyle and our minds to a superhuman level, serious concerns about humanity remain even if, in the best-case scenario, we will not be destroyed as many predict. In all this automation the question foremost on my mind is the loss of jobs it will involuntarily cause. “Nearly half of American jobs today could be automated in ‘a decade or two,’ according to a new paper discussed recently in The Economist.” Another paper in the Harvard Business Review from December states that “technological progress has always displaced workers. But it also has created new opportunities for human employment, at an even faster rate. This time, things may be very different — especially as the Internet of Things takes the human factor out of so many transactions and decisions.” According to it, replacing workers with intelligent machines could mean replacing the work of 100 million workers worldwide by just 2025. “The dislocations would be profound.” Where will these people go? What will be the source of income for the displaced workers? For now, no one knows.

In my opinion, there is one reason and one reason alone for there to be a chip in the brain: tracking behaviour and controlling thought. Most technology startups are falling over themselves to discover new ways to record and map behavior, and venture capital firms are throwing billions at them. The reason is the brass ring: accurate behaviour prediction of the Tom Cruise blockbuster Minority Report variety. It is exactly Orwellian and it is about control — over as many as possible, as quickly as possible. Recently, Mark Zuckerburg, the 20-some, youngest billionaire in the world, asked the Chinese president at an Obama White House dinner to choose the Chinese name for his unborn daughter. The Chinese president simply said “No.” Facebook is banned in China. That is not changing anytime soon because China does not want to beholden foreign companies every time they want access to tracking data on their own citizenry. They can only hack things so many times! Zuckerburg’s grovelling is a moment to remember; nothing is off-limits for billionaires when ingratiating themselves in the hope of gaining more market share.

Once Facebook introduces its ‘dislike’ button for real as opposed to the range of emojis it has introduced for now and Yelp starts its app of rating people from one to five stars in November, people’s vulnerability towards their measure of self-esteem as defined by social media will be deeply accentuated. In 2013, scientists at two German universities performed a study on Facebook users and “found one out of three would feel worse after checking what their friends were up to”. Someone else’s happy holiday was a source of depression for them. “Overall,” wrote the study’s authors, “shared content does not have to be ‘explicitly boastful’ for feelings of envy to emerge. In fact, a lonely user might envy numerous birthday wishes his more sociable peer receives on his Facebook wall. Equally, a friend’s change in relationship status from ‘single’ to ‘in a relationship’ might cause emotional havoc for someone undergoing a breakup.”

According to studies, the younger the age, the higher the vulnerability to measuring self-worth in comparison to other people’s successes and failures. On top of which, no one knows the extent of false representation online. Clearly, it is pervasive enough that sites like Finstagram are emerging. “Finstagram is a fake Instagram, or second account, which, ironically, is the more truthful of the two and accessible only to close friends. The one everyone sees, the real Instagram, or “rinsta”, is the acknowledged fake.” Keeping up with the madness is impossible. No doubt, there will be upsides of artificial intelligence like advances in medicine to fulfill the wish for endless life but, by 2030, a lot of people will be banging down Google’s doors to be hybrid humans, happily paying to insert chips in their heads. Being part-robot will be their elixir to escape the reality of an existence formed by a virtual world that has become their quicksand. Creepy or awesome? No one knows but, given our trajectory, it is not looking good. Still, if one claims to be on the path that leads to God through the friends of God’s, “hope materialises out of despair” and that thought might be the only one that holds the power to survive everything else.

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The writer is a freelance columnist