Events: AI, Trust & Your Relationships
People are rightly worried about jobs but what happens to trust in your most intimate relationships when anyone can analyse private chats for psychological weaknesses?
How do you react to or interpret life when you can no longer be sure if a loving message was written by your partner or their AI assistant? This is the level at which we need to start thinking about Artificial Intelligence.
We have talked about the structures we are subject to in life normally. AI represents a new kind of structural force, and it will impact how you interpret and live in the world in multiple, deeply personal ways.
Talking about AI and Human Loops is the same as talking about AI’s effect on human lives. We will be talking about this topic a lot over the coming months, I imagine.
There are three major points to make here.
Everybody has their own version of what AI is or might become at this point.
Mine is that on an immediate business level, it as at least equivalent to the Internet in the 1990s; on an economic level, it is a new Industrial Revolution; on a knowledge level, it challenges the Enlightenment values that underly modernity; and on a human level, it is an ontological attack on our very creativity and meaning systems.
It is as big as the invention of the printing press. For the first time ever, machines can essentially create what humans see as original work (text, images, etc).
It will do untold destruction to jobs, sectors and whole economies. Top global AI bosses and politicians are walking on tiptoes around this issue because they know what it implies for families, companies, voters and politics over the next few years.
If you think it’s just about LLMs and chat bots, you’re not focusing on the right level.
Ask yourself why the top AI companies have already spent hundreds of billions of dollars on the new global space or nuclear race and why the world’s top militaries and spy agencies are all in. They understand the power opportunities in what is unfolding in the different versions of latent space exploration currently being invented.
There will also be a massive new division or redistribution of wealth.
If you currently generate income from a job or small business in anything at all related to content, data or knowledge creation, transmission or transformation—which is a very large chunk of modern economies—you are absolutely right to be fearful of what AI might do to your income or business, unless you decide to rush to learn how to use it in your field before your competitors do.
Whole businesses, sectors, markets and economies are going to shift.
3 ways AI fits into Human Loops
From the perspective of our new framework here, there are three important first things to say about AI and how it will affect human situations and outcomes.
Number one: AI is a massive new technology element for everyone at the global structural level and starter versions of the top models are already available on everyone’s phones. It is going to have a major impact on the whole global economy and down through all of the sub-levels, most likely including your own business, job or income. And if it affects so many jobs, it will also then impact families, societies, politics, culture, values, media, content creation and the public sphere. Over a couple of decades or longer, some kind of rebalancing of roles will occur. In the meantime, there is going to a lot of creative destruction.
Number two: AI is already available for you to use in analysing your relationships with others, on a personal or a business level. You can already use it to better understand (or manipulate, or negotiate with) your girlfriend or boyfriend, your friends, your family, and your business partners or prospective new clients. There is nothing stopping you from dumping whole WhatsApp chats or email threads into ChatGPT or Claude to do pattern-matched meta-analysis of the underlying psychology and motivations of your actual real-life relationships. On the positive side, maybe you help a friend leave an abusive or manipulative partner but what happens to trust at all levels when nobody can be sure how any message, image or audio was generated?
Number three: people use generative AI (chat, text, images, video) at the interpretation of new meaning level. Not only are we already using it to help us understand things we do not, we are asking it for more or broader context and then what all of that means too, both in terms of society level news events, or business situations or personal relationships and even deep personal meaning of our own life stories and how they are changing. This is AI as a trusted counsellor, advisor, consultant, priest or psychotherapist. Or this is AI as a new colleague in your ideological meme warfare crusade. AI operates at the level of semantics, semiotics and memetics and human beings are constantly, inevitably, unstoppably generating new meaning and interpretations of our world and lives across all of the different complex contexts we inhabit.
Your turn: Which of the three areas outlined—societal structures, relationships or our own sense of meaning—worries you the most with AI? Why?
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My worry is centered around the big picture of society degrading into a 2 classes dystopia. AI is now free sourced or easily obtained with minimal cost but that's because it's still learning and the wider the engagement with it, the better it will become and when it reaches the super power level, those who owns it will become even more powerful and the rest of humanity will become more obsolete, to be castrated and left to die in a zoo-like areas.
On a personal level... I don't worry much about. worst case scenario I'll become homeless and then die. No biggie. But I'll probably be taking some courses about AI tools because I like to stuff about stuff.
Artificial intelligence so far has democratized access to the type of information that before would have taken me years to learn. I use it as a coding assistant to help build and test hypotheses and run experiments using proper methods. It had been enlightenment on a massive scale.
However, I have begun to see the threats involved with the use of AI in content creation specifically. If all humanity is culture, and cultural values grow and shift over time, and all culture and values are basically stories - then what happens to human identity when these stories are now synthetic? Are they even “real” anymore?
One could say that any made up or imagined story is synthetic but is it really, if it was conjured up in the mind of a homo sapien?