A Hammer By any Other Name...

Earlier today we visited the boys over on Ynys Môn, and one of the topics of conversation was AI, a subject difficult to avoid these days. But I put forward my thoughts that after the speculative market bubble bursts - as it inevitably will - the perceived existential threat that a lot of people imagine to be posed by the technology will simply evaporate, and AI per se will simply slot into our global toolbox of technologies to be used in the pursuit of our quite mundane needs and requirements. Every disruptive and apparently revolutionary technology in its day appears as a threat to the societal status quo, provoking often violent reaction to its implementation.

This scenario is true of any radical technological innovation: at first disbelief, then astonishment, followed by a gold-rush to exploit it for all its worth in the markets. This is where the kick-back starts; where the disquiet at the potential for negative societal impact begins. Outrage against the machine on both moral and political grounds, very often disproportionate to the actual, real-world effects occasioned by it. As has been the case throughout history, the revolutionary and the shocking become the de facto and the prosaic. When a technology simply becomes yet another tool in the box, it loses its magical status and its sheer mundanity removes its sting. Sometimes the breakthrough technology can appear at first to be a universal panacea to solve the ills of the world, rather than a threat, like DDT or Teflon. Web 2.0 was meant to be such: E-Learning [as it was then termed] was going to be a liberating force for good in education, equality and accessibility; removing the barriers to internet access for millions of otherwise technologically-disenfranchised people: allowing access to educational and reference material by the masses in the spirit of Tim Berners-Lee's original vision for the World Wide Web, as it was originally dubbed.

What we got as a result, however, is where we are now: pretty much the capitalist morass that many of us predicted that it would eventually become after the initial euphoria of discovery and good intentions. But, as in the case of all the other disruptors that capitalism and speculators like to throw at the rest of us, the sting of that 'revolution' has been depleted under the weight of the inanity and ineffectuality that this 'revolution' has sparked. Yet another great idea thrown under the bus of greed. AI as global threat? Not at all: its current, rabid adherents are only, as usual, interested in the money, and that will soon disappear in the vapour of ill-judged speculation when the inevitable stock market burn happens. Stick it in the toolbox along with the rest of the spanners, hammers and spinning jennies...