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Artificial Intelligence is not Human

When we think about artificial intelligence, the images that come to mind are from Terminator, Ex Machina, Eagle Eye, or maybe AlphaGo. 

But I believe that is missing the point. It makes us think that AI will happen sometime in the future when it is already here.

Today AI narrates videos on YouTube. If you listen carefully, the narration still feels slightly off, but I know many people who can’t tell the difference unless you point it out. 

There is the fear that AI mass deployment will displace the workforce, and if you can’t work, how will you get paid? And if you don’t get paid, who will continue to be the insatiable consumer that powers the capitalistic economy? 

These are good topics for debate, but AI is already used in a subtle but powerful way. 

Artificial Intelligence is used to control human perception. And when you can control someone’s perception, you have a high degree of control over their behavior. 

You may think that you are immune to this. But if you use a smartphone, a search engine, or any social media, you are in the middle of it. 

There is so much content generated every second that no human mind can ever process it all. So we need a filter. We need a way to sift through all this data and find the information that is relevant to us. 

When you search for something, you will get the first ten most relevant results out of millions or sometimes billions of entries. But who decides what “most relevant” means? 

You could argue that the end-user decides because if the results were not relevant, they would use a different search engine. But it is not that simple. The order in which results show up impacts how much you trust the result. And what happens if a business is pushed on the second or third page? It becomes invisible to you because you trust the engine, so if that business has fallen in rank with the search algorithm, then for sure, they are no longer relevant to you. Right? 

Social media takes this to a whole new level. Not only do you expose yourself to “only what you like,” which reinforces your confirmation bias, but AI has the power to subtly but surely affect your feed. So you are more gradually exposed to a product or a concept in a way that you feel is natural, and therefore it was always “your idea.”

This ability to alter perception is what I mean when I say Artificial Intelligence is not human. It is a mistake to assume it has human capabilities, interests, or even goals. It does not. 

Think about it.

It used to be impossible (or extremely expensive) to track a group of people, a target population, and slowly alter their perception of reality by gradually changing the information they are exposed to. Not because it was hard to do, we’ve known how propaganda works for a long time. 

The difficulty is the focus and effort you would have to put into it, track everything, and do micro-adjustments on the fly. But where humans fall short, AI shines. It is trivial for a computer to keep track of large data sets, to apply a gradual change, and monitor the response. 

What a human controller needs to do now, is to simply instruct the AI what the goal is and then relax. The algorithm will apply subtle but precise pressure to shape the target audience’s behavior.

And this is both good and bad. 

Parents are well aware that techniques to shape behavior are useful to help their children rid themselves of harmful habits. An AI assistant would make this very easy, with constant reminders and suggested actions based on the latest data. 

But what happens when the controller behind the AI does not have your best interest at heart? When, instead of being used to create empowering habits, it is used to develop addiction and further unconsciousness in people. 

Is there a way out? 

I believe it is. And it has to do with expanding your awareness.

Pay more attention to your thoughts and monitor your emotions. Ask if this is truly important to you or have you been conditioned to perform a particular activity? Determine what is important in your life and write it down as a guide system. 

Mystic schools say that the mind is an excellent tool but a lousy master. And we are now in the era where the mind can be greatly amplified to our benefit or be used to sink us into unconsciousness. 

Why are you doing what you are doing? Who is in control of your thoughts, emotions, and desires? What informs your opinions?

Size does matter! (for AI)

There was a contest where a man used a scythe to cut the grass from a parcel faster than a person using a lawnmower. Here is the video.

I was watching that, and something felt wrong about the whole setup. And then it hit me! No, it was not the fact that there is nothing scientific about the video :). 

The problem is that the parcel had a carefully selected size so that the man with the scythe does not get tired. What if the test parcel was ten times larger? 

Even if a machine is one hundred times slower than you, it will beat your performance on a long enough time horizon.

Why? Because it does not get bored, it does not get tired, and it does not sleep. In three words:

It doesn’t stop!

This idea applies best to Artificial Intelligence. You can argue that AI is still not smart enough or fast enough to make connections, but the progress never stops!

There was a time when you could say:

“I have read all the books on this planet!” or

“I have watched all the movies ever produced!”

Not anymore.

No human mind can ever go through all the data we have produced (and continue to produce). But for a computer algorithm, it is not a problem! 

Imagine the connections you could make or the insights you would have if you could read all the books that exist today.

An AI can already consume way more that than we can imagine. And the ability to also comprehend the data is increasing with time at an accelerated pace. 

In a few short years, I believe that AI will be objectively “smarter” than us in measurable ways. 

Will it also be sentient? That’s is a story for another time.

Doing Business in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

I don’t see many people speaking about this, but artificial intelligence will fundamentally change how we do business.

It is already happening behind the scenes, but it is only visible to those who work in this field. 

Here are some examples.

Infinite Personalization.

Any decent newsletter service allows you to personalize the message to include the customer’s name and other personal data. But with AI, this can go so much further. For example, a color theme can be automatically selected for each user based on the time of day the email goes out and even the reader’s mood. The message will be sent in their mother tongue using a perfect translation. 

The presentation of your site will be uniquely tailored to each of your visitors or customers. 

This fine-grained personalization is impossible for a team of humans to handle, but it is trivial for an AI, especially when you aggregate data from multiple sources. It may not be possible for you, but you can bet the big guys are working on it. 

Each of us will begin to see and interact with their unique and custom version of the Internet. 

Next is the “No Code” “No Design” options. 

You will be able to describe to an AI system, in natural language, what you want to offer and to whom, and you will instantly get an app and a website built for it. AI will render most developers and designers obsolete and lower the barrier-to-entry for many inspired entrepreneurs and creators. 

Can a computer do it?

Your offer should be something that cannot be easily explained or described.

If you can explain it easily, then a computer can do it much faster than you and at a near-infinite scale. 

I believe most businesses will be surprised to wake up being obsolete overnight, but some pay attention and position themselves to take advantage of the upcoming tide.

Critique

There are some examples on the web where the AI is really dumb or comes up with solutions that make no sense to us humans. It is also said that AI will never be creative. 

We can add this to the long list of things that we previously thought a computer could not do. 

The development of AI (as with most things related to computers) has an exponential development curve. This means that the distance between a “dumb AI” and a superintelligence is not as long as we might imagine. 

We can choose to leverage this new powerful tool or resing to watching others do it.