Human Element in the Age of AI
As we fully enter the age of AI, we embrace imagined possibilities with great excitement. We rush in heady glee toward the myriad IoT devices and digital sensations coming at us with unabated scalable algorithms and celebrate the novelty of things seen and unseen with unquenched wanderlust for adventure, even as we hint on the periphery that our very survival may be at risk.
There is certainly tangible and growing trepidation as we step ever closer to Pandora’s box, knowing full well the demons we will unleash.
Increasingly we talk of foreboding dystopias and next-gen amalgam of bio-cyber consciousness in a messy soup of legal and ethical confusion, laced, or even steeped in fear of the unknown. We speak of social ruptures, massive job loss, and super languages and apocalyptic interfaces that reveal the dark side of Singularity.
The very subtext of our fear is loss of human value. As the third industrial revolution gives way to the fourth cycle, we feel fundamentally challenged with artificial intelligence’s self-learning and logical prowess, and even its artistic content creation from seemingly infinite patterns. It appears that structure of thought and reason is no longer the monopoly of our species.
We have at long last created our reflection in our own image and are watching it take shape and materialize before our bewildered eyes as it reaches back out from the fluid mirror of data flow and begins to erase us. We prophesied this in Terminator, Blade Runner, and Matrix, at the altar of fiction or self-fulfilling prophesy, only, this is no longer fiction.
At this point, it seems we cannot stop human addiction to the efficiency and optimization afforded us by AI, nor can we stop the cult of technology offering us phantom panacea as it takes us further and further away from our core and inherent values. The question then begs, where to now, how long do we have, and what of our children and the world they may or may not have — what have we done?!
In all of this, there is something we rarely consider, or at least we have not addressed in a manner warranted of the concept: human evolution and transformation in the age of AI. Perhaps it is time to reconsider what it means to be human, and more importantly what is our inherent value.
While Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking warned us of the dark side of AI, perhaps we can consider the opposite aspect, where AI offers humanity an unprecedented opportunity to evolve as a species and explore and deeper and resonant patterns and geometries that define the architecture of 22nd Century.
It is entirely possible that AI is the blade with which humanity cuts the umbilical cord that has tethered it to its current womb, which we have outgrown, and we are now at the advent of a Nouvelle Naissance.
What is the Value of the Human Element in the Age of AI?
