It’s as if we’ve extended ourselves with tech gadgets. Although the electronics are not attached to our bodies, they’ve become very much a part of us. Today, it’s impossible to think without a computer, or store your thinking without it. And by computer, I mean anything and everything that can compute.
If you read Deep Work by Carl Newport, you will find yourself going down the rabbit hole of thinking about how we handed over our life and time to mechanical and electrical distractions, and how they took over our data, and our thought process, and influenced our neurological patterns.
How could we do this to ourselves? We’ve given up so much to our digital selves. While we’re still discussing how private our life is on the cloud, we’ve completely forgotten that the privacy part isn’t even that important compared to the psychological, intellectual, and emotional discrepancies we’re creating for ourselves. It’s the part that we least understand and explore nowadays – our thoughts and our ability to think.
It all started in a jungle, a few million years ago, when a human experienced the first conscious thought process, due to a small change in our genome. As evolved humans, we can think, and act upon our thinking, and do what’s best for ourselves and others. But then, comes into picture an unconscious computed intelligence that can think for us.
It knows almost everything about me, you, and Mark Zuckerberg. Even he will not be spared when these things that we call AI go all bonkers and start activating mass destructive algorithms across the world. But that future is a few decades from now, after we’ve completed given up all our lives in the hands of our then Massiah – the intelligence.
Sounds like a Tom Cruise movie, but it isn’t. It’s all true. For example, let me ask you a question – I have taken a loan for about Rs. 500000, and I have to pay about 16500 in interest every month for the next 36 months. What is the interest rate?
Think about it. And also think about how long it takes you to actually find a solution. If you have a humanly acceptable IQ, you will take about a minute to come up with the exact answer, an answer that an AI, like chatGPT, can figure out in less than 2 seconds. It might have the answer ready by the time you finish asking the question.
There are a few question that come to mind:
- Can Computed Intelligence make better day to day decisions for average humans? If yes, what is the purpose of average human life?
- To what extent can we let computers take over our lives?
- Can you survive without computed intelligence?
- Can computed intelligence create a religion?
How do you approach this problem, and what future holds for the human race? The numbness that we experience, as we transition into the future, and the things we use technology for, need censorship.
For example, according to psychologists, it takes about 13 years for a child’s analytical thinking to develop. After that, the patterns created during those first 13 years appear in their lives in the form of different experiences. But today, we see children less than 2 years of age effortlessly browsing through youtube, choosing their perfect cartoons, and watching them as long as one of the parents is bored with their own form of entertainment and wants to be entertained by the child.
Would it not be right to censor a child’s attachment to technology, as least, as long as they are not of age? What if children, five years from now, start using technology to solve problems that should be solved mentally? Will AI and other technological advancements decrease their IQ, and to some extent EQ?
If computer intelligence becomes as prominent as we now believe it will become, what tasks could (should) we hand over to them? And what tasks should never be handed over to them?
Would you allow an artificial intelligence to teach your child your cultural rituals? Would you let it cook new recipes for you? Or would you let it tell a bed-time story to your kid? And if it can do all this well enough, where will you stand in the eyes of your child?
Recently, The 1% Club, a financial education company in India laid off about 15% of it’s staff, saying perplexity does most of the jobs for them, and it must have been way cheaper to do it that way. The company fired content-strategists, content creators, and to be precise, they fired someone who took three days to do something that computer intelligence did in seconds. I expect to hear more such news in the coming days.
There are many questions that arise in one’s mind, as we look through the cultural shift that will happen through these technological explorations. To understand where we are, and where we are heading, we should first make a list of where today’s technology stands.
Current Technological Scenario
- Computers are getting really fast
- Computers can mimic human decisions
- Computers have their own neural network (the internet)
- Computers can find patterns in data
- Robots becoming accessible to everyone
- Amalgamation of robots and intelligence
- Average Human is getting dumber by the day
Why are we doing this?
In one word – ease. As humans, we strive to make our lives easier. We want someone to cook for us, do our dishes, wash our clothes, and drive us to our desired destination faster. We want things fast and easy. And we have spent a tremendous amount of our intellect on building mechanical and electrical technologies that can achieve this.
Then there are those who are driven by hunger for exploration. Some advancements have happened to make things easier, and others through one or other form of hunger – to do or achieve something that they believe is right for the society. Such tendencies are found in industrialists. They have the hunger to achieve something beyond the norm, which is eventually, almost always, converted into a product, and then sold to excite the population at large or offer an easier lifestyle.
The path of mental conditional – the habit of doing things the hard way
One of the foremost qualities of the human mind is hard work. Centuries of documented human history has proven that our minds are capable of achieving tremendous amounts of work. And with appropriate training and continuous application of our intellects, we can achieve things that a computed intelligence may not. Here’s a brief explanation of the qualities of a human mind.
- Human mind can tap into the universal intelligence – While this approach is mostly philosophical and not entirely technical, there is no other way to explain how we are able to do things impulsively or out of sheer intuition. We can build charts and statistics, but at the end, there’s what we call a gut feeling that drives us to make decisions.
- Human mind operates out of habitual patterns – Although there’s ample amount of data available to sometimes reason with what we do, we do things about habit and patterns our mind forms through our habits. We are practically slaves to our habits, and anything else will derail our whole system of living our lives.
- We often operate with a limited data set – A human mind collects and stores data in a very unknown manner. Yes, there’s all the science to prove how our brains store and retrieve and analyze the data that forms our mindsets and our behaviors, there’s very little knowledge about how we decide and do what we decide and do. Sometimes this is good, sometimes bad.
- Our mind can not be idle – The mind constantly needs some form of stimulation. It’s like money that needs an activity. We are constantly bombarded with stimulations that surround us, and we’re losing control of our minds because we’re no longer relying on it, or using it as often or enough.
One of the most incredible achievements of humanity is to be able to understand how the mind works. In India, China, Japan, Indonesia, and other so called third-world countries, where religions play a prominent role in human behavior and lifestyle, we find that rituals are designed for subconscious stimulation.
The very essence of many of the cultures is simply this – give your mind something to do. Let it chant mantras, observe the breath, cycle awareness through different parts of the body, or cycle awareness in a deity. The consciousness, or awareness then becomes a tool to control the mind. It is tough, but we can train the mind. Instead of letting the mind impulsively decide for us, we witness its behavior and what it feeds us to stay stimulated and involved in itself.
We’re about to lose our minds because our whole sense of awareness is taking a back step when we mindlessly accept technology as our savior. We’re submitting to technology that may not submit to us in the future. We are no longer using our mind to analyze or witness it.
We’re on the verge of losing our minds to computed intelligence, simply because it has more computing power and data analysis than the whole human race combined. You might as well start calling it your God. We just need a few billion people to do this and there you have it – a fresh new religion and faith.