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No, AI Won’t Transform Humanity
Your AI cringe is actually culture working exactly as it should. This will make AI better for humanity.
AI it seems, is in everything, everywhere all at once. Including in toothbrushes, perhaps toothpaste soon? If you’re on LinkedIn, there’s all those posts about the “tells” of AI, from em dashes to “it’s not x, it’s Y”, same on Reddit threads and Twitter (aka X). Then there’s AI slop, which has lead to its own entirety of memes. What are seeing is a cultural immune response to a technology that was thrust upon society and what society felt is that agency was taken away from it.
Every revolutionary technology in history has arrived with a great promise that it will change everything and all will be wonderful. But eventually, these technologies learn the lesson; no it won’t. Humans, through culture, change the technology. We domesticate it as I wrote about earlier this week. So, can we, will we, domesticate AI? In the long run, most likely. But it is culture’s biggest challenge yet.
We have always domesticated cognitive technologies. 2,400 years ago Socrates said writing would ruin our memory. Good thing Plato wrote that down I say. Television was supposed to destroy civilization, instead we got frozen TV dinners and the snack industry. We did it with the printing press…
