AI Doom Is Not Our Inevitable Future

I’ve been seeing and hearing far too many expressions of hopelessness and fear about where the age of artificial intelligence is taking us. A broad swath of the population, including business, political, and educational leaders, is making decisions based on the assumption that outsourcing our thinking, writing, and creating to AI is the irreversible course that has already been set.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis lamented, “It is inevitable that AI will be used to promote various agendas and to expand power for those who are devising it.” China’s Premier Li Qiang observed, “AI is everywhere, it seems omnipotent.” And British-Canadian computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton has bluntly asserted, “There's going to be things we do and the superintelligences just get fed up with the fact that we're so incompetent and just replace us.”

I’m puzzled by this confidence. Because nothing is inevitable. Not the doom scenario of superintelligent robots taking over the world. And not the hype scenario of a coming utopia born of eternal improvements in every conceivable type of technology. The premise of inevitability is one we need to mindfully reject.

Make Bad Business Unprofitable

There is certainly a problematic business strategy at work here.

Some of the biggest corporations in history are steering brilliant minds towards the research question of how to free us lesser beings from the impossible burden of thinking for ourselves and making choices. And the allocation of vast resources to that end should be challenged.

Equally troubling are Big Tech’s efforts to make generative AI ubiquitous. It is not an accident that we are finding an AI loaded into every one of our devices. Part of the strategy is normalizing an effortless use that eventually becomes reliance. And yes, as we’ve noted before, the appeal of ease and convenience are strong. We don’t have a great track record of resisting mindless ease.

But the inertial pull of convenience is not enough to discount the power of free will, intuition, and choice. While every problem might have a technology-based solution businesses are eager to sell us, we are under no obligation to buy or use them. We can reclaim market mechanisms as tools in support of a more human-centric agenda.

Thinking with BEAM (body, environment, action, and mind) is a hopeful stance, nudging us to a constant pivot in the direction of team human. Stepping out into the world, leading by doing, making choices that open the door to more choice, always receptive to the reactions and surprising explanations shared by friends and peers, and looking for the chance to foster new relationships with people that can help us in unanticipated ways, is the antidote to inevitability.

Demanding Better is Naïve Only If We Give Up Hope

AI is being framed as a determinist force that our societies lack the power to resist. Humanity is framed as impotent in the face of algorithms that have managed to transcend human control. Some members of government are hustling just as hard as corporate actors to evoke the perception that AI is a revolution that will make every part of life different, and that it is far too late to even try to change course.

This is nothing more than unsubstantiated messaging grounded in the willful denial of history. Inevitability can only be sold when politicians remove from the discussion active human agency and the constraints of social structure. Demanding better from our political system is naïve only if we have given up hope. Neither the powers of capitalism nor democratic governance are too complex for us. We can stimulate unpredictable change driven by our artful thinking and rejecting the politics of inevitability.

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Don’t let the cynical voices dominate social discourse on building the future. Artful creators surprise, resist, and innovate. And all embodied beings have the potential to be artful. Keep the algorithm confused and inefficient. The more effort you put into breaking your habits and patterns, the more difficult it will be for the algorithms to have your number. Accept paradox as fundamental and draw from its power to undercut the effectiveness of predictive algorithms.

Disrupt prediction, quantification, and social engineering by using your own words. Between the failure of our education system to nurture individuality and the expansion of technology that not so subtly corrects our word choices and finishes our sentences, many of us have forgotten how to access our unique vocabularies and modes of sense-making.

Remember that we are free and able to choose what we do and what to hope for despite algorithmic pressures. Trust your humanity more than your gadgets. Question the accepted wisdom of an inevitable future rather than conform to it.