Artificial General Intelligence will make you feel special, very special

Thrilled that Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) will make your life even more efficient? Wait till you find out what else is in the works. If you feel you count for nothing in this world, you are mistaken. AGI will make you feel special, very special. AGI takes education seriously -- because it is always learning new things about you.

If you have transited through any of the major airports in the US, Western Europe or Japan, no doubt you will have noticed that, except for the travellers and the security people, hardly anyone else is around. The shops, restaurants and airline check-in counters, the few that are still in existence, don’t have any staff to speak of. They have all gone ‘self-service’.

If you want to get a bite to eat, there is no paper menu for you to look at nor are there any wait staff to take your order. You need a smartphone to satisfy your thirst or your hunger. You point your phone at the QR code prominently displayed at each table, place your order electronically, and sullenly glare at your phone while waiting for it to be delivered by the sole hapless soul from the kitchen. Good luck finding someone to complain to if an incorrect or badly prepared item was delivered. Robotic service, but no robots. Not yet. Even graveyards are livelier than modern airports or restaurants.

In a few short months, you will be surprised to learn that the price that you will be charged for anything you buy -- food, clothing, travel tickets, taxi ride, etc., -- is dependent on who you are and how much you can afford. This is profiling at its finest, no personal detail too small to ignore. Items sold in stores will no longer have fixed prices attached to them. They can be instantaneously changed by AGI programmes to suit the customer. Or the occasion. Remember ‘congestion pricing’?

Advanced systems such as ChatGPT-4 are based on ‘large language models’. Other large AI models in the fields of physics, chemistry, economics, medicine, and climate (several such models already exist in rudimentary form) will be deployed in the near-future. Predictions are that when these models interact in a neural network learning environment, a vast treasure trove of new knowledge will be created that can ultimately prove beneficial to humanity. All in the belief that the private sector is much better than the public sector in all manner of things. However, no one engaged in AI research has come up with a satisfactory explanation for how exactly a system such as AGI would work and, more importantly, why the output of the system should be trusted.

In his New York Times essay of June 30, 2023, titled, “The True Threat of Artificial Intelligence”, author Evgeny Morozov takes issue with Silicon Valley IT stalwarts and their fawning admirers in scientific and academic circles who are cheerleading ongoing efforts to promote AGI. Morozov argues that for-profit corporations’ ‘solutionism’ approach to what ails public spaces and organisations is always market-based and that the privatisation of public enterprises and laissez-faire economic policies of the 1980s which are still in vogue serve to explain why AGI is a harbinger of bad things waiting to happen.

If you live in the US, you simply cannot avoid interacting with AI systems (‘intelligent agents’) that are already in place. These software agents evaluate your applications for jobs, college admissions, loans, etc., and pronounce judgement. If any problems are encountered, you are prevented from contacting a human to resolve the situation.

Make no mistake, the handful of companies calling for a new ‘Manhattan Project’ to develop AGI will end up controlling the world, and nation-states will become a thing of the past. These for-profit companies would love to get rid of any restrictions placed on their operations, privatise all services provided by any nation-state (including the US) to its citizens, and gain control of State-owned entities. In short, no more public schools, community hospitals, fire and police departments, public utilities (water, sewer, electricity, gas, transportation), etc. Why, even the military, what with mercenary soldiers (human and/or robot) lurking in the background.

The after-effects of the original Manhattan Project, which produced the A-bomb, are still with us and are not distant memories. Just ask the survivors or their descendants in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima.

The IT crowd is not schooled in the arts, humanities or social sciences. But most of all, history.