Ai And the death of authenticity

AI.

All I hear lately is talk about AI. And I don't understand it. 

Not because I’m technologically inept, a 5G conspiracy theorists, or one of those new-age hipsters who tweet about wanting nothing to do with anything that ain’t from “mother earth”. Not even because I happen to know the copper and zinc in my gold and shiny iPhone aren’t from outer space…

But because I’m a fucking hypocrite, just like you. 

As much as AI is becoming part of daily life, making the rounds in both the media, news, and your uncle’s list of things that will threaten his many freedoms, chief among them the right to own several semi-automatic assault weapons, most of us don’t really seem to want to understand it. 

And listen, I’ve got nothing against the advent of technology. Rather, I welcome it. Anything to lift humanity from the more abysmally bleak aspects of modern society. 

Technology is(or at least, I choose to believe it is) that promise. A way to go beyond our own human limitations. A method able to eliminate the redundancies. Solve the complex problems. Quantum compute.

Change our world.

PART 1: We Need To Talk.

I was born in Kinshasa. A small, albeit now much bigger, city in the now Democratic Republic of The Congo, then formerly know as Zaire.

I was there, you see, when they were fighting about the name.

That’s where I spent my early years, in a small community called Mongafula. We used to walk miles in order to get clean drinking water from a well.

And in my community, outside of the superbly well directed, though somewhat poorly acted Terminator 2: Judgment Day, I had never heard any talk of AI, except in that movie. There, it was a bleak cautionary tale, warning humanity about the “rise of the machines”. 

Skynet. 

An artificial intelligence that achieves self-awareness and quickly deduces that we, humanity, are the most complex of problems. A species most proficient at artificially expanding our numbers past our natural boundaries. Consuming everything in our path, rarely replenishing what we consume.

We build communities into villages, villages into towns, towns into cities, cities into States, and finally States into countries. 

And I write this now living in The United States of America, Mongafula a distant memory. This is my county now, after some trial and error. And I think that, for a very long time, I’ve taken for granted just how much bigger the United States, my country, is. Compared to my previous country of the Congo, compared to most countries. Sometimes it feels like there are mini-countries in this country, it’s so large.

And I think I've noticed that there must come, with such size and the expectation of national commonality or community, a certain necessity. And that necessity is communication.

We need to talk.

We all need to know how the other is doing and why. To see if maybe we can help, if maybe we can ask for help, or emulate in order to help ourselves. And I know, to some of you this sounds overly optimistic, downright idealistic. Like the woo-woo ramblings of the aforementioned conspiracy theorists and gold iPhone owning naturalists, but it's true. 

And I’m telling you this because, goddammit as much as I resent it sometimes, I’m one of you. I’m part of humanity. 

I can get that macro. And I’ve now experienced enough to know that one only tends to get that macro when the micro seems a little hopeless.

One only calls out for help when one feels a profound sense of hopelessness.

But even within those depths, those black and torrid waters, there is something- there is this, us- talking. 

We need to talk, after all. 

How else would we know how the other is doing? We haven’t evolved to just sense it in others. At least not yet.

Humanity to me has always signified one thing. The possibility for hope. 

And that is because, in my humble opinion, hope and humanity both have one very defining quality.

We both tend to stubbornly remain. 

PART 2: A Profound Sense of Hopelessness

Have you ever been in a room and you could sense the hopelessness?

You could feel its cold, lifeless breath in the air. Could see it pouring out of hard, manic, and sunken eyes.

I have. 

And I can sense it simply because I have fond memories of entering rooms bursting with so much joy and vivid hope.

When I was a kid, my parents would host parties in our home, and sometimes, my uncle would show up and he would get very drunk and dance at these parties. And though my mother and father often spoke ill of him, as he was prone to borrowing money he wouldn’t repay, that man could light up a room with hope. 

He would dance. 

He would dance and dance, in the traditional african style. Wrapping a liputa ‘round his waist and, I can only describe it as- gyrating.

Comme un vrai Baluba. 

Hips swinging. Legs bending. That boy was like a human gas station inflatable. And god, would he make me laugh. I’d watch in wonder as he moved, laughing- and always laughing with him. You see, when my uncle danced, he would smile, and he would smile so fucking wide. 

I think it was probably because of all the fun he was having. And often my mother would join her little brother in the dance. My father even would too sometimes, when he wasn’t stoically watching us from an armchair in a corner somewhere.

And just like that, my uncle, whom not many liked, was often talked poorly of, would fill my childhood home with laughter, with song, dance, and so much hope. 

And by now you’re probably asking yourself: Gaël… What's any of this got to do with AI?

And I’d answer: Everything. 

See, what I did there was tell you a story. No data. No lesson. No information. Nothing for you to really make “use” of. From one of my earliest experiences of just living life. A memory. And part of me doesn’t even know how much of what I told you, of what I remember, is true.

My mother would be a good source. She could validate. My father would probably be a good foil as well, and I know their accounts would be vastly different from my own. Without them, I wouldn’t know who to ask and trust in the retelling. Yet as soon as I hit publish, some artificial intelligence somewhere will eventually appropriate this memory of mine as data; a way to “learn”, what it means to be human.

So, it got me wondering- what matters more? 

Truth or hope?

When I think of artificial intelligence, I see a harsh and incomplete truth, with very little room for hope. Very little leeway for the mistakes we make as humans. For the mistakes we’ll always make as humans.

I see such an intelligence as unable to remember or distinguish the difference between hope and hopelessness, because it has never felt either. 

And I know this might sound odd as the more technical and practically inclined among you begin to debate purpose, but given the goal of AI is a machine that has self-awareness, a very human trait, can I hazard that an emotion like hope, often the crux in any argument used to redeem humanity’s, should be part of the conversation. Or are we not factoring for that? How does one codify hope?

Without it, I envision an entity unable to ask for help. And what a hopeless existence that would be. I would not wish this on my worst enemy, much less my creation.Yet, this is what we offer the future. Against all this hopelessness, something to remain.

Something to help those we’ll leave behind. When they can no longer remember, and we cannot offer them neither a reliable source or the foil against which they can for themselves, discern the truth.  

Because I imagine, pretty soon the only difference separating humans from AI is the ability to be critical of oneself. 

And maybe we will breach that barrier, and I would give my left arm to live to see it. But at this rate…

All I can do is talk to you in my writing. Let you know how I’m feeling.

And hope.