Too Much of a Good Thing

With all the hoopla surrounding AI and its ever-increasing employent in all forms of human endeavor, the truth is that AI is only the latest technological development in a long series of digital breakthroughs. Even now, AI’s successors are rearing their ugly(?) heads. Apparently Quantum AI and zero-click marketing are showing significant signs of life.

All of which leads one to wonder where will it all end? Or will it ever end? Visionaries are emerging with speculations that AI is moving in the direction of true creativity and original thought. Some claim that the day isn’t far off when AI will think for itself and not simply rely on scanning the massive amounts of data it’s been fed to date.

Remember when they used to say that “the sky’s the limit.” With all that’s emerged over the past few decades, it might appear that they were aiming too low. Not only is the sky limit, space might even be too confining. Once freed from the bottle, who’s to say where these technological genies will lead us and what unknown wizardry awaits coming generations.

Some theorists worry that the speed of technological development is outpacing the ability of humans to keep up with it. If the technology so exceeds the human ability to grasp and utilize it, what forms of devastation will that bring? Will our machines out-smart us? Will military advancements reach a point where we destroy ourselves? Will the chosen few who best understand technology’s capabilities and potential form a permanent ruling class that will subjugate the rest of humanity?

Or, will the iPhone89 enable us to conceive our own entertainment storylines and transfer them to Netflix in a single sitting? Or will it enable us to embed ourselves into reruns of Gilligan’s Island? With all these machines doing our thinking for us, will our brains atrophy to mere gobs of mush?

Of course, some say that, given the state of some segments of society, we’re already there. Mush, you huskies.

“What are we to do about an invention (the internet) whose end result is that starving people in China are looking up things on marthastewart.com?”

— Douglas Coupland, Canadian novelist, designer and visual artist