A[I] Zombie Apocalypse Is Already Upon Us
Having been introduced to an end-game scenario for AI with James Barrat’s Our Final Invention in 2013, I’ve been obsessed with finding optimism in its development. I failed. Allow me to explain.
As a marketer of 20+ years, I play with human psychology. I know firsthand how easily we can be manipulated. And since 2013, I’ve spent hundreds and hundreds of hours reading about AI and countless more leveraging it for work, interacting with it, and thinking about it. I have come upon what I believe to be the inevitable outcome, and it’s not far off.
Humanity has seen a decline in social interactions and a rise in loneliness, isolation, and distrust. This dramatic shift in social dynamics can be traced back to starting with ML recommendation engines and smartphones. We were unprepared and unable to cope, and many of us still do not possess the self-control necessary to be present in our lives with other humans. We whip out our phones in any moment of stillness to get some stimulus for fear of being alone with our thoughts or during a human-to-human interaction because the conversation has gone on longer than a TikTok. This will be amplified by AI’s increasing prevalence and capability for mimicking humans.
As this technology advances, AI-generated content and interactions will become more prevalent. Whether it is the proliferation of chatbots, videos and photos indiscernible from real humans, automated customer service, improved social media algorithms, and news sites, AI is taking over many of the once human-to-human creations and interactions. This shift is creating a world where people are becoming increasingly disconnected from each other and are losing the ability to form meaningful relationships and tell facts from fiction.
One of the most significant impacts of this newer form of AI is the rise of loneliness and isolation. As people become more reliant on technology for communicating and interacting, and it becomes better at mimicking meaningful relationships, we will continue to lose the ability to have meaningful face-to-face interactions and, worse, be less interested in these types of human-to-human interactions. This will inevitably lead to amplified feelings of loneliness and isolation, as people feel disconnected from others and unable to form strong relationships. It is likely to also lead to a lack of empathy, as people become desensitized to the emotions of others and less able to understand their perspectives.
Another impact of AI is a decline in trust. As people become more reliant on AI-generated content, they will lose the ability to trust each other and even become uninterested in trusting one another. We can see this leading to a breakdown in social cohesion and creating a world where people are more suspicious of each other, depending only on their AI-driven technology which conforms to their biases. It will also lead to an increase in selfishness as people become less able and less interested in understanding the perspectives of others and more focused on their own needs and desires.
Furthermore, AI-generated content is a significant source of distraction. Social media algorithms and other AI-powered content can create an environment where people are constantly bombarded with stimuli, making it difficult to focus on the task, leading to a decline in productivity as people become less able to concentrate and more prone to distraction.
AI at the advanced level it exists today is enough to significantly and negatively impact human communication and social dynamics; we’re seeing it now. It is already leading to a decline in meaningful face-to-face interactions, an increase in loneliness and isolation, a breakdown in trust, an increase in frustration, a rise in dissatisfaction, a loss of patience, and a rise in distraction.
I do not believe a Terminator-style scenario is likely. What I believe to be unavoidable is much less exciting and much more sad. The most likely outcome of the rise of AI is that humans fade into the background, whittling in number until irrelevance and expiration.
As we move forward, it is vital to consider the impact of AI on our social and emotional well-being and take steps to mitigate its adverse effects.
I, for one, am still exploring how to battle these things in my personal life and the lives of my loved ones. I’m still determining what winning looks like.
I predict that this was generated or substantially edited by AI.
It’s not quite as dreary as the raw results of asking ChatGPT to write a whole essay, but platitudes like this are typical of AI prose:
As is the lack of anything concrete: no data (I predict that the James Barrat reference was provided by the poster), just impressionistic ramblings about the present and daydreams about the future, carefully structured into paragraphs signposted with “One of” and “Another” and “Furthermore”, a banal melody that is not enlivened by the rumpty-tumpty rhythm.
Considering that GPT uses texts generated by humans for training, there should also be many humans writing like this… or am I making a mistake somewhere?
The mean need not resemble the data.
Eliezer caricatured a certain form of platitudinous writing here, well before the LLMs, so yes, maybe some people do write like GPT’s excreted mashup of the whole internet. So much the worse for them.
But the OP here...I stand by what I said of it, both the quality of the prose and its likely source.
Thanks for the feedback. I wrote it, and I use some Grammarly suggestions to make my writing more concise because I write initially like a stream of consciousness in whatever the most simple form I can come up with is and don’t spend much time editing.