AI brings huge potential to humanity, but the way it is being implemented today also brings potential detriment. Artificial intelligence, or more accurately large language models, have the potential to help humanity break into new frontiers where imagination is the only limit. Don’t have experience with starting a bicycle business but want to? Hash it out with ChatGPT. Want to create a fully automated online business? AI could do that for you too. However, AI can also stop you from problem solving and thinking entirely, risking making humans dependent on locked ecosystems to function in the modern world. “Grok is this real?” is a great example of mind slop.
Many companies are rolling out services with AI baked in. Don’t know how to setup web hosting with a popular service provider? Just ask their AI and it will do it all for you — no thinking or understanding of the topic required. Don’t want to manually police your Google Maps users to make sure their listings are correct? Let AI take over that job. Did they appeal the decision to delist them? Let AI handle the appeal too. Domain expertise will become a thing of the past in the AI world, which means we will all live in AI slop. AI will be the great equalizer that drags us all up to one common standard, but without the magic touch of human excellence or disruptive solutions.
Another huge red flag is the profit motive. A truly useful AI must be free, open source and accessible to all equally. Equal opportunity, but not equal outcome, which is in line with biology and life itself. This is the ethos of freedom. However, most LLMs today are owned by massive companies and your access is entirely dependent on their goodwill, your ability to pay, or both. The largest issue with modern digital platforms (or ecosystems) is that you put all your proverbial eggs in one basket. You could spend years optimizing a business (your livelihood) to function on Google, Facebook, Shopify, YouTube, or any other walled garden, only for that access to suddenly be revoked (by an AI) without explanation. When modern humans start relying on tools like ChatGPT to do basic thinking, revoking access to the tool means they will essentially be left in an infantilized state, unable to think or problem solve since they have delegated the act of thinking to a robot which they don’t own.
The loss of domain expertise leads to reliance on and blind trust in AI. Without domain expertise, human ingenuity and problem solving is taken out of the context entirely and is replaced by whatever “sum of all parts” ingenuity the AI can muster. Secondly, walled gardens and AI behind paywalls means the profit motive of the owner will take precedence over any potential benefits a riskier, more sovereign (freer) implementation could result in. Finally, the fact that most people use AI today as a form of lazy reliance on an external thinker means they will grow even more dependent on technology and become more malleable, blindly trusting whatever the AI says. It is Orwellian squared.
In summary, there are two futures ahead of us. In one, people become independent, sovereign masters of their own destiny while breaking new ground and exploring new frontiers using AI as their tool and helper, yet never handing over their autonomy to the machine. In the other, people become dependent on proprietary AI for basic critical thinking skills, communication and even decision making. Independence and autonomy is lost and humanity devolves into a malleable mass lacking original thought. Whoever controls the AI in this scenario, controls the world. It is a power hungry person’s wet dream. I hope we choose option one.