In a few years artificial intelligence virtual assistants will be as common as the smart phone.
– Dave Waters, pioneer of artificial intelligence
While everyone seems to be throwing themselves headlong into ‘technology’ and artificial intelligence in a frenzy of euphoria without treading the waters, let me play Devil’s Advocate.
Let’s take ChatGPT for example. It writes for you.
It mimics a human conversationalist, it can mimic the style of celebrity CEOs and write business pitches, compose music, teleplays, fairy tales and student essays, answer test questions, write poetry and song lyrics, translate and summarise text, simulate entire chat rooms, play games like tic-tac-toe and simulate an ATM. (now WHY is that even necessary?)
ChatGPT may even be used as a personalised therapist. And hey, it is politically correct as per how certain quarters dictate political correctness to be. So, to guard ‘sensitivities’ – read that as censorship based on selective narratives, queries are filtered through the OpenAI ‘Moderation endpoint’ where potentially ‘racist’ or ‘sexist’ prompts are dismissed. And we now know that ‘racist’ or ‘sexist’ are just terms to shut people up who have a completely different narrative than one that fits the flavour of the day.
So, what happens to people then with the advent of ChatGPT?
We won’t need writers with different perspectives, we won’t need poets, playwrights, musicians, entrepreneurs. Heck, we won’t need thinking. Period.
Your right brain becomes numb without use, because everything is copy-paste and we lose our creativity, the only thing that made us special – our ability to think, create, innovate.
If there was an alien invasion in this planet, it would not come with guns, rockets and lasers to destroy the human race, like in our predictive Hollywood movies. That would only unite us, against the common enemy – because an enemy you identify and see is an enemy we unite against.
The trick is to keep the enemy invisible, while creating so much chaos, discord and disharmony within us that humans start thinking we are our own worst enemy and fight amongst each other.
The better ploy is to remove all that is real to us, all that we believe in and cast us out into a sea of cacophony, utterly rudderless and lost without a cause. To turn our creativity against us.
Here are a few ways how this can be done:
- Remove the basic fundamentals that makes us humans. Genius. How can humanity fight against aliens when we don’t even know what being human is anymore.
- Remove our genders so even Supreme Court candidates cannot define what a woman is anymore and reality becomes questionable. Shame and scream into submission the ones who dare stand their ground on fundamental realities of Mother Nature.
- Remove the inherent goodness in us where we love one another universally so we constantly fight over religion, race, nationality, skin colour and sex and whichever new war is brewed by the trouble making aliens.
- Remove empathy for one another and animals so we become cold, callous and self-serving – numbed of compassion and kindness. Ripe to become willing automatons for a new dystopian world.
- Remove our grounding with Nature, which keeps us in harmony with the universe. Instead, keep us glued to smartphones, laptops, virtual platforms, the metaverse, microchipping etc so we go further and further away from the real world because of ‘convenience’ and into an artificially created one. An artificial world that the aliens can control.
- Remove our ability to think for ourselves, our basic independence, by creating a viscous stifling environment of thought policing where you are shamed, guilted and disempowered by a group of soulless robots under the control of the aliens, for having any opinion other than the opinion that the aliens and their controlled propaganda media put out.
The aliens do all of the above by controlling our fear of not having enough money. From birth to death, you are told that you need money, and the more you have, the more successful you are in the eyes of society. And what is society but a construct? A construct of whatever the aliens are deciding for us.
Humans in their imprisoned mindset of following the money trail without reservations, compromise the future of humanity as they know it by prostituting themselves for a quick buck.
Technology is an enabler, not a replacer and should be used cautiously.
Just like a gun. Guns don’t kill people, people kill people. If governments remove guns from everybody because they don’t trust the common man enough with a loaded weapon, why give the exponentially more loaded gun of AI to a tiny group of big companies who are already monopolising whole industries and nations. It’s akin to pointing that loaded gun to our head and pulling the trigger.
For a successful alien invasion, all they need is the final frontier of humans helping themselves into extinction. Willingly and submissively.
Here’s to ChatGPT, the final dying of the light.
The views expressed here are those of the columnist and do not necessarily represent the views of New Sarawak Tribune. Feedback can reach the writer at beatrice@ibrasiagroup.com
