Is AI A Threat to Human Purpose and Creativity?
Is It Too Late to Change?
“Family feud turns wild when a fight breaks out on stage”
This is a headline advertised this morning on my browser’s homepage.
It was a link to a video about a father and son sparring on The Family Feud stage, and not some short clip of a spontaneous chaotic scene the word “fight” conjured in my head. You know, the kind that could derail a show’s success.
Sometimes I’m left to wonder is it me. Is it my bias that leads to the click? Is the writer responsible for my disappointment, relief, and excitement of seeing a wholesome act on a family game show, instead of the worst of what humanity can offer?
(the son won, if you were curious)
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Yet, the change in how we communicate information isn’t some whimsical word choice. It’s by design. Presenting a hook, framing ideas based on how people search for topics, and using language that represents how the audience experiences things are just some of the suggestions I’ve received when researching how to get more readers, followers, likes, subscriptions, and clicks. But I’m left to question, am I changing language based on intuitive desires, trends or more importantly am I changing my communication tactics based on how artificial intelligence presents information?
Are we losing our humanity in the process of becoming successful in a technological age?
This week Motion and I attempt to answer this question from two different directions. The first is our typical spiritual perspective. We discuss where purpose comes from, how it feels to be in tune with our purpose here on earth and what it’s like to be removed from it. We both agree our purposes emanate from what we call the spark, a place within all of us that serves as our compass across eternity. We also agree that there are forces that may pull us away from that purpose, crippling our ability to correctly assess that compass. For the second episode of the week, our on the ground episode, we discuss what those forces may be.
Artificial Intelligence is a hot button topic for us. One sister believes it will become sentient and be our undoing. The other feels AI will be a benefit to humanity if humanity is able to stay in touch with the very attributes that make it, well, human.
The more I question technology’s influence in our lives, the way we adhere to a 24-hour clock, laws, taxes, and the demands of commercialism, I can’t help but believe that it isn’t just artificial intelligence’s fault. After all, social media can’t be addictive without the information we’ve pumped into its learning systems over the last few decades. Human patterns aren’t non observable phenomena. We can be caring and violent, understanding, and bigoted all at the same. The problem arises when we force feed an artificial system the biases, the behavioral guides, and psychology we use to sell products, organize ourselves along party lines, and establish rules for going to war. This information is fed to learning systems that now influence how and why we should start a TikTok video with something intriguing or use certain words because it attracts more views.
How do we avoid repeating the atrocities and perpetuating the ugliness of past failures when systems use the past to learn?
There’s only one answer: fight for the right to be human in whatever form that may take.
Motion and I discuss those ways in the final episodes of a season based on identifying and discovering spiritual parts we may need to weather what is coming for humanity.
Shared DNA 4 Lyfe: Where Spirit Meets Blood is a spiritual podcast hosted by two sisters on Spotify and Pandora. New episodes on Thursdays and Saturdays, unless it’s vacation time.
