Artificial Intelligence is Blinding Us
Back in the 1980s when the world was fun, there was a great song called “She Blinded Me with Science” by Thomas Dolby. It keeps coming to mind when I think about artificial intelligence, avatars, deep fakes, and the frightening trend to abdicate our responsibility as humans for this tool we created and unleashed with little thought for its long-term impact.
As people, we tend to experience changes in science through our daily use of technology from software to hardware and how we use these at work and for personal tasks. When something new comes along like AI, everyone talks about how it will “change everything” and we just must accept it because it is already here and being used. This tends to happen fast and seemingly overnight because the conventional wisdom spouters tend to drown out those who ask questions.
This makes riding any sort of new wave difficult if not impossible.
The nonprofit community tends to get pretty wound up when things change fast because frankly, too many nonprofits move slowly. Based on my own experience in this profession for several decades, I look at the impact of technology as a series of big waves.
I identify the First Wave as broadcast fax, the Second Wave as the Internet and Websites, the Third Wave as social media, and the Fourth Wave as the advance of Artificial Intelligence (AI).
In the First Wave, Broadcast Fax freaked everyone out because the message could go to EVERYONE at the same time. Oh my! It seemed like instant messaging at the time and you only had to send the fax once. When people realized it saved time and energy, the freak out became a good one (think good acid trip v. bad trip).
Then we had the Second Wave of Internet/Websites (these came really close to the same time as Broadcast Fax and overlapped in my experience). We had email and all of a sudden all we had to do was hit send to share information with our stakeholders. Wow! Even better than Broadcast Fax. And then we had these cool virtual places called websites. Many nonprofit boards were clamoring to have one even though they weren’t quite sure why.
But then the next Freak Out: social media, or the Third Wave. Talk about instant messaging; now people from all walks of life – and all our stakeholders – can send messages from their mobile device. Yikes, not wow. How do we deal with that? My attitude was social media is not that big a deal because it’s just like Broadcast Fax but faster.
Ah, but there is the operative word: FASTER. Everything got faster really fast. But nonprofit organizations don’t do fast. Fast is scary. Fast means you must make a choice. Fast means you have to be fast too. Fast is not the comfort zone for nonprofit organizations. Why is fast scary? You can’t control it.
Now, we have the Fourth Wave which is causing a different kind of panic: Artificial Intelligence or AI. It is capable of doing research in seconds or minutes that a human might take hours or days to complete. Using AI as a research tool is fantastic because it can find data of all kinds and even create a bibliography. The downside of AI is that it is not always correct (at least at this stage) and because it takes existing information and compiles it fast, too many people are confusing this with creating something new.
AI does not create; it takes what is already out there and collects it; basically it is an ongoing exercise in intellectual property violations. Any writing it does, any designs it creates, any lies it tells are based on something someone else said. In a lot of ways, AI is just a mannequin like Knucklehead Smith. The problem is that we are giving this Knucklehead too much control and influence.
The waves are great because we can ride them. But AI is turning into a tsunami that could destroy everything we have built and launch a new Dark Age led by dictators and thugs. No matter how fast it is, AI is not human and it is definitely not intelligent.
AI is IP theft at the speed of light. Let’s not let it blind us.
