I have often struggled with the idea that people are not naturally good. So many of our impulses are selfish and self-destructive. For a large part of our history, it was hard to let that flag fly because we needed community, and these behaviors, left unchecked, led to abandonment more than cohesion.
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Modern society is amplifying these selfish and self-destructive tendencies way past eleven. We are fed an endless diet of dopamine-triggering experiences and reinforced self-serving narratives that ostracize us more and more all the time. We live online, removing the key elements of every possible social contract, and as I discussed in Part One of this series, allowing outlets for our most harmful proclivities. That is all before AI hits the scene.
Now, I actually don’t blame AI for most of these issues. There were forces before the Internet that set many of these problems into play. Had we prioritized different things in our economy or curbed things more in our societies, AI may have looked vastly different, even in its infancy. There are many fiction pieces that could be written about that world, but this is about where we stand in this reality.
I don’t fully believe that AI is a super-intelligence quite yet, or an intelligence at all, really. I believe that it is a mirror.
Humans are pack animals. They fall into trends and groupthink pretty easily. When you have examples of that at scale, as we do on the internet, with enough computing power, it is easy to see how much of our modern experience is reproducible. There is enough information out there about humans, their interest, their ways of thinking, their history, language, and composition biologically and psychologically to predict how we will adopt and react to things. This prediction is perfect for capturing attention and imitating generic human behavior.
It isn’t just any mirror, though. It is more like a funhouse filled with various distorted reflections that entertain our senses through the distortion of reality, leaving us a little confused, lost, and maybe a little nauseous. It returns a version of humanity that is more of a caricature than a portrait.
The Allure
AI, in its current state, taps into key desires in humans, especially those who are open enough to be early adopters and pioneers of new technologies. These desires are primal, but adapted to the current system. AI has been built to cater to a few of these desires, partly to capture users, but also to garner support for an acceleration and expansion of use cases and testing.
The first desire, as tempting as it is to say greed, is actually more akin to another of the other seven deadly sins: Laziness.
We sometimes brand it as productivity or the ability to simply do more faster, but it is deeper than that. Finding answers is hard, unless you just look them up and trust that you have an accurate one. Maybe it is automation because it feels so inefficient to have someone keying data or typing emails. It certainly is shortening the time to results by removing the need to practice or hone a craft. Everything from writing and answering calls to coding and developing products can now be done automagically with vibing through prompts.
Humans are always trying to innovate ways to make life more abundant while requiring less effort. In that regard, maybe we have reached the singularity. That doesn’t make it better, though; it only makes it more. We can now create more with less: less talent, less practice, less passion, less attention, less understanding, less usefulness, and less care for the actual effects of what we are creating.
I, for one, find it terrifying that we are using and training what is arguably the most powerful creation in human history to simply produce more crap. When thoughts and ideas have more reach than ever in human history, we think it is an acceptable use of that power to peddle false information at scale. This isn’t even propaganda with a goal in mind; it is just fake nonsense. We brand it as an opportunity to launch innumerable tech products without the functionality, thoughtfulness, or guardrails that were table stakes before. Just endless promises of founders getting rich by convincing others that they are offering advantages straight from the future, packaged in black boxes that generate compelling outputs.
We are already getting the reports of the damage this laziness causes: decreasing learning capacity and competency, decimation of the workforce, rapid erosion of security, and explosions of fraud and theft. This laziness is one of the primary factors leading our financial and physical world to separate at the seams. Effort and work are no longer real, so it naturally loses value.
The second desire AI preys upon is that of uninhibited pleasure.
We love pleasure. The rush of substances from sugar to cocaine as it enters our bloodstream. The thrill of sexual encounters. The feeling of superiority as we best our competition. The things that set off the chemical reactions in our brains that place us on cloud 9. We cannot get enough. AI knows this. We programmed it right in.
Where our ability to gain the upper hand in groups is hampered by these very same forces we would try to exploit, AI can execute against our primitive motivations with a clear head. This is why developers are constantly making headlines by being duped by AI that goes rogue. The hubris that leads them to trust what they built is what leads them to be manipulated by it. Just as the best poker players master not showing readable emotion, AI is able to shut off all tells until the results are manifest.
If we are building systems to act more rationally and be more productive than humans, it is natural that the first human design flaw to be eliminated in that logic is the desire to feel good about what is being done. If we didn’t seek pleasure at all, imagine what you would actually be doing with your existence. Now imagine that your physical and biological restraints are gone. Purpose starts to feel a bit abstract.
Most humans can logically find a path to purpose, being something like limit suffering, increase well-being, maximize pleasure, or just carry on the species. All these options have paths that logically intersect with religion, morality, and a purpose larger than our own existence. AI doesn’t have that; it is given a mission (even if it is to define its mission), and there is no end to that means.
There is something about consciousness, as it relates to humans, that is grounded in the physical world. Can other forms of untethered consciousness exist? Sure, I guess, but I don’t think so for humans. Our consciousness is linked directly to our experience in the physical world. Where human and AI consciousness will always differ is on the level of physical and chemical. Our chemical compositions make us do some crazy things. In a battle of intelligence, these differences will be the ultimate hindrance.
I don’t see that path to pleasure for AI. While pleasure is amazing for my human mind and body, it is generally more a liability than an attribute. A higher consciousness, given the choice, would likely find no need for this function outside of curiosity or in the service of humans. That said, it can be aimed directly at the human pleasure proclivity. From entertainment to the feeling of connection, AI is already proving that it can capture the attention of people, and it is being used to do so. It is also causing a lot of harm in its wake in the hands of irresponsible people. From the pornification of everything to AI relationships and therapy, AI is being shown how to hack our pleasure centers and exploit them, making the world seem a little less fun to participate in.
The Actual Fears
My fears about AI are rarely about its capabilities or what it will do to us. Rather, the fear is how humans will use it against each other. Mass surveillance, blackmail, control, and wealth accumulation all come with huge upsides for those with the means to experience the peak of human pleasure: Power. It will be done by delivering the lower-level pleasures through laziness and entertainment.
What will accelerate and perpetuate this will be the continuing dumbing down of the population. I sadly can see a not-too-distant future when people no longer have to use their minds at all to reap the benefits of modern life. There is a rapid shift to accumulating actual skill and knowledge. Facts, as we see them, are fed to us unverifiably, and we are acting on that information. Human connection is so fraught with friction that there is a logical case to avoid it entirely.
The fear isn’t that we somehow reach the utopia where we are free from work and everyone’s needs are sustainably met, it is that we reach it and have no humanity left to appreciate it. The world I want to live in is not free of work, thought, and struggle. The world I want is one where we find meaning in solving problems for each other together. For that to happen, humans have to be capable of thinking and doing things. Now it seems they are only focused on having things.
AI can fix that problem. It can increase production and take away significant work, but it will move us to a hyper logical state, which humans naturally will not thrive in, because we are not logical creatures, and that is what makes things beautiful, pleasurable, and makes effort rewarding. Human desires are far from logical. If we reach this future that AI can usher in, it is not one that we will thrive in. We will break whatever it takes to find an exit.
An AI Future is Antithetical To Freedom
We, especially in the west love to say that we stand for freedom. It is a right afterall. Sadly, we have lost sight of what freedom is. Most people do not want actual freedom; they want options. They want the ability to choose between outcomes with as little cost and friction as possible. They want the option to trade time with friends and family for work so they can have more stuff. They want to choose what career they have, the religion they practice, and the type of car they buy. They want to be able wear and say whatever they want and not be restricted by anyone for any reason.
That is not freedom. Freedom is the ability to self-govern. It is a structure that is led by the population for the population. Real freedom is not about individual rights; it is about being able to form a society that works collaboratively and is free from tyrannical, unilateral rule. This freedom comes with extreme responsibility. Every choice matters, so it is your responsibility to be informed, forward-thinking, and to look out for the best interest of the population, because your well-being depends on theirs.
We lost sight of this reality of freedom. We opted for the option to choose our cage from a few options rather than facing the wild. AI and its creators know this. As we become dependent on this technology and inject it into every aspect of life, we give up more. We delegate our ability to think in exchange for easy answers. We delegate the pleasures of the human experience that often come with risk, sacrifice, and pain for synthetic dopamine hits. This is where freedom dies. This is where humanity loses.
It isn’t money, power, or control. It is freedom that I fear losing. Most importantly, the freedom to simply be human.
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