“Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.” - Frank Herbert

These words from the Orange Catholic Bible, in the fictional universe of Frank Herbert’s 1960s sci-fi novel Dune, serve as a warning to all of mankind to be wary of Artificial Intelligence after humanity fought a centuries-long war, called the Butlerian Jihad, against rogue sentient thinking robots who threatened human existence. Humanity in that universe found itself too profoundly entrenched in using these thinking machines and was soon deemed unnecessary by them. 

Artificial intelligence, in the form we know today, is nothing but a complex attempt to mimic and replicate human thought by feeding datasets into well-designed algorithms that combine the abilities to gather relevant data and present it in a manner that makes it look human-like. Though rudimentary in its early forms, the advent of software like Dall-E and ChatGPT has raised the bar for what an AI is expected to be capable of.  Even as I was penning down this article, Grammarly used its “AI” to correct the grammar constantly. Instead of seeing this rise at face value as just technological improvements, we must look at the consequences it will have on the lives of everyday people in the coming decade.

AI chatbot ChatGPT’s answer when asked about the consequences of advancements in artificial intelligence.

Even though this isn’t a “sentient” AI, we must understand that it doesn’t need to be sentient or capable of self-thought to be able to disrupt our daily lives; it just needs to be good at following orders. The invention of modern computers never replaced humans as humans were never expected to perform complex calculations and thus enhanced the productivity of each worker, as most of them were just following orders. So when you have the technology that makes a computer capable of following moderately complex orders, it’s clear that it renders a lot of the workforce expendable. For employers, an investment into an AI workforce is a one-time investment that provides them with a scaleable workforce that can work round the clock. At the same time, the fancy bells and whistles known as human rights are inapplicable to them. 

Whether it’s the cashier processing orders at the supermarket, the accountant filing tax returns, or the junior lawyer performing basic tasks for his seniors, artificial intelligence can not only do their jobs for cheaper, but it can also do them better. Of course, this is not the first automation scare that society has experienced. Previous scares have come and gone, but what emerged from the ashes of old jobs were newer jobs that required more specialization and hence paid better; thus in the long term, automation has always proved beneficial for wealth creation overall.

But patching and maintaining software is much easier when compared to hardware; a small team of developers could fix bugs and issues in a software that is used by millions daily. Thus the emergence of newer jobs in the age of AI is an idea that seems optimistic at best. But the job market is hardly one where we can speculate with certainty; who would have thought that the advent of social media would have created a whole job sector that consisted of managing social media accounts to boost engagement or the analysis of user data at such a large scale.

DALL-E generated this image when given the prompt "Teddy bears working on new AI research underwater with 1990s technology".

Now that we have covered artificial intelligence’s ability to follow orders, let's talk about its ability to emulate human creativity. Using software like Dall-E and Midjourney, users can create entirely unique AI-generated images by inputting text prompts. How these images are generated would be a topic that lies beyond the scope of this editorial, but it essentially involves three steps. Understanding the prompts given by the users, identifying the images associated with these keywords and then scrambling and unscrambling multiple images and combining them till the creation of a unique and prompt-accurate image has been achieved.

These artworks exhibit a sense of originality that makes it very hard to fathom the fact that they were not made by humans and make us contend with our perceptions of creativity.  Maybe the human creative process is just a very advanced algorithm that is running inside the biological computers that are our brains.

Artificial intelligence can thus replace both clerical jobs and artistic jobs. But the usage of art created by artificial intelligence commercially is both legally dubious and ethically wrong. As it allows everyone with an internet connection to create art, it creates unnecessary competition between people who have spent sleepless nights perfecting their crafts and newbies making art through text prompts. Questions have also been raised about whether AI-generated art can be protected via copyright. In order to train software such as Midjourney and Dall-E, among others, their machine learning models have been fed large amounts of data from all over the internet. A lot of artwork that has been used to train these models would itself have been copyright protected and thus used without express permission from the copyright owners. Therefore any artwork generated by these AI software programs would violate hundreds of millions of copyrights if it were allowed to be used commercially. No doubt, as awareness about this issue grows, there will be judicial rulings regarding the originality of AI-generated art.

“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.” - Frank Herbert

This is another quote from the Orange Catholic Bible, describing how human society in the Dune universe gave up their thinking and decision-making faculties and instead relied on artificial intelligence to make these decisions for them. They thought this would liberate them from such menial burdens and allow them to focus on the better things in life. Instead, it influenced them in such a way that they were essentially enslaved by the people who controlled the artificial intelligence.

In a sense, this is not so far away from the reality we are currently faced with. Social media algorithms have great sway over the opinions we hold and the decisions we make. Whether it involves isolating us in a bubble that reinforces whatever political opinions we hold to increase engagement or the products we buy due to a system of targeted advertisements that essentially use every bit of our personal data only to profit large corporations. Thus there has been a marked rise in political extremism on either side of the spectrum, a decrease in attention spans, and an increased urge to spend money on products we do not need. Due to the ease with which information can be spread across the internet and the amount of information out there, we have replaced the ignorance of the pre-internet age with the opinionated ignorance of the modern era where everyone believes that they know what is right.

Speculating about the future is a gamble that, in hindsight, rarely pays off, but common sense is not something one should lose faith in. With a majority of low-level white-collar jobs being threatened by the advancement of artificial intelligence, there shall certainly be a change in how our economies function over the coming decades. Whether we become a consumerist dystopia running on a universal basic income or a utopia where robots do all the work, the safest thing to do in the short term would be to upskill oneself and make sure that we don’t have to face the future armed with weapons of the past.

- Aditya Dubey