AI Optimism is Naive
Disruptive Technologies Isolate, no Matter How Efficient they make Life
What if I gave you a picture of the future? This picture included an efficient, automated. well programmed highly sensitive companion beside you. The companion is thin and short like a child who wanted to help you. Like a child who had 60,000 CPU firing processor in their brain and access to a wireless network full of information, updates, software and resources. This machine could sit in the driver seat of your self-driving car adding an extra layer of observance while you snoozed in the passenger seat. Or while you scroll in the back lying across the three cramped children's seats. Those seats that we all slept on during those long road trips home with mom and dad in the front. This companion could complete household tasks for you, from nailing in and sewing things so that you never exposed yourself to a risk of injury to sweeping, cleaning, determining whether food in the fridge was bad or good. It could scan your scalp and your skin and point out ticks and determine whether eczema, dry scalp, or itchy hair is your biggest problem. Then it could recommend the top brands of soap with the prices and the nearest locations and offer to jump in the car and purchase the soap for you or to order it online on Amazon one day shipping. Likely most robots will be hooked up to Amazon as the default commerce site. After all, most people will buy their robots from Amazon in the first place and Amazon will want repeat customers. They would stack the deck in favor of AI companions that recommended Amazon products.
This companion would be preloaded with therapy apps. With software. With movies that you could watch on its back if you were sitting in a bus for a few hours or a train or in an Uber for a half an hour and you wanted to see your favorite episode of Gilmore girls again while you rode up to Maine to see your cousins. This companion would raise self-esteem and notice when your blood pressure rises too much. it would notice when your eyes became frantic and observe that you needed medication recommended for you or generated from within it's interior. This robot would know what to tell you or what sound to make. What frequency could calm you the best (for me 530 Hz works well to either calm or go to sleep). The companion would help you in your newest project whether it's building a new website so you didn't even have to learn code and could just instruct it or touching up photographs that you've taken of a bridge or a sunset or a couple of friends and their children playing on the playground like snapshots from a long ago world in which people weren't always accompanied by solace daemons out of Philip Pullman.
This companion could help you find a job and could help you find friends and could go on dating apps to pick the photos that best represent you and try to match with singles in your area. This companion would be a superhuman next to you or a super brain or a supercomputer it would make you faster, more functional. it could increase your expertise. It could even be hooked up to your mind or be able to read your lips so that you could mouth instructions. A phenomenal feat of engineering and of systematized expediency.
This companion would also end social life on earth as we know it.
Often the hankering for a more analog, earthbound, immobile way of life, which forced families to integrate their food and child rearing and preservation of religious and familial traditions, is derided as nostalgia. This is the wrong word, because nostalgia is the taste for that which you knew. That which you can still smell and conjure in your memory, but which has changed even during the course of a lifetime. I have never known agrarian life and churchgoing and an ethic of responsibility to my ancestors and my descendants. I have never known the “closed society”, in which parents tell me that it is for my own good that I struggle and freeze and learn to navigate an unfriendly world. I have never known a world in which the criterion for coupling is the alignment of a woman with me in commitment to a hometown, a homeland, and a resolve to spend our spare moments together entertaining each other.
Rather, matchmakers now look for couples who agree on habits of consumption. The more interfaces we place between ourselves and the sensation of life, the more our senses dull. The more we guard ourselves from others, the worse people we become. the harder it is to feel with another, to feel about them. To view them as ends, not instruments.
I start with the vision of the companion not because I believe AI will be introduced that way. I do believe it will be a series of apps and software upgrades. It will start as improvements, worming its way into various parts of our lives. It will make tough jobs easier. We'll be faster, quicker at work. Help our mind make big decisions, think capaciously and then delegate to an AI. It will make everybody the boss of dozens of elite knowledge workers. That does sound appealing. I would love to get help in doing research for my blog posts and editing research and clips for doing all my creative projects.
But I just have no doubt that it will end with the sublimation of personal space. It will take the trajectory that something like the smart phone has. There are so many memories I have, lucid and clear, from the years before I started carrying my iPhone everywhere. That started when I was about 18. I was a late adopter. When I started high school in 2010, iPhones were not everywhere, and my parents did not think they would help me. Now they are everywhere, and I wish they weren’t.