Artless 16 - Destroying the world unknowingly  15th February 2025

Do we need to automate everything?

We often talk about technology as if it is just a tool and that there isn't anything good or bad about it. The good or bad, we are fond of saying, comes from the use case. I myself used to believe this, but I have changed my mind in recent years. Technologies do come with an inherent ethic of their own and there is a limit to how much of a change our use of them can bring.

In his book The Shallows, Nicholas Carr writes about how the ethic of a technology exerts influence over the user. A gardening implement for example, turns the user of it into an extension of itself. A man holding a sword can't do anything other than what a sword requires him to do. He can choose to not do it, but the sword is only an instrument to kill and cut. I wrote recently about how even something like a newspaper changes the person reading it. While reading it, you can't do much else. It takes control of your ability to do things and keeps that control till you let go of it.

I feel the discourse on AI needs to be looked at in a similar light. A lot of people who defend its rampant use everywhere seem to be under the impression that it has no default nature and that everything depends on how we use it. I do think intention plays some role, but it is also clear to me that intentions can't cross the barrier created by the ethic of AI.

What is it that we do when we use it? What is a chatbot really?

It's a tool that generates strings of text in response to a prompt. These strings cannot be controlled. Changes can only be suggested. The text generated by the chatbot has only one purpose - to seem authentic. It doesn't care about actually being authentic. It doesn't care about truth. It doesn't care about the harm or good that it does. It can't care about anything.

It is ony designed to have the appearance of authenticity. When we use it, we become someone who doesn't care about authenticity and accuracy. We become someone whose only concern is observing the appearance of authenticity and being satisfied. Wd are becoming okay with bad art because AI art looks good enough. We are becoming okay with bad writing because AI writing is good enough. We are getting comfortable with false information because AI generated answers look authentic enough. We are devaluing truth.

In our quest to imagine a future where everything is automated, we have let go of the expectation that perhaps not everything should be automated. The signs are all around us. All we need do is open our eyes.

Vimoh