Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a tool everyone has become familiar with, and one everyone has been told will shape our future. We’re told it’s a tool that we’ll need to incorporate into our work, in order not to fall behind. We’re told, in essence, that we simply have no say in the matter. I disagree.
AI is an invention that has changed the landscape of our digital world, similar to the invention of the internet. When the internet launched, some people believed it would be a fad that would soon die out, and, of course, they were wrong.Â
The internet provides anyone with access to it the opportunity to gather information on any subject of interest to them. In this way, it’s similar to AI, but the difference is that the information coming up on regular search engines is entirely human.Â
On the internet, you can explore the perspective of someone who has a PhD on any given academic subject, or you can read the perspective of someone who made a Reddit post in 2012, who happens to have an answer to a highly specific problem you’re facing.Â
While AI draws from a human perspective, that’s all it can do. The internet can give you perspective from people who have spent years doing analysis to create new ideas, while AI can only regurgitate what’s already been created, instead of exploring creativity in new ways.Â
Humanity is what keeps AI going, and that’s why, with time, I think we’ll tire ourselves of it.
AI can do a lot, but it’s a soulless mimicry of human life and thought. It’s a search engine that destroys the environment and threatens to take our jobs. The jobs it ends up performing are usually starter jobs that used to be reserved for youth, such as cashier roles, to help them get their foot in the door of employment.
This replacement, if handled poorly, could result in a large population of youth completely stripped of work experience until they get their first full-time job. Without prior experience in a work environment, this could have detrimental effects.
When AI takes these jobs, it doesn’t do them very well. I can use self-checkout to buy my groceries, but more than half the time I end up needing the employee in charge to fix any errors the robot cannot fix itself. It’s nicer anyway to go up to a cashier to chat about the weather getting warmer in the spring, or about upcoming holidays. AI cannot mimic the warmth of humanity.Â
If we were to rely solely on AI to perform creative tasks, would we not tire ourselves of it? If we relied on it to produce essays, art, and music, would every essay and piece of art not eventually start looking the same? The beauty of creativity is that every collection of work by every artist has something uniquely different about it. If that human art vanished, AI would become a shell of itself.Â
The point of AI is to mimic what people can do. It can spit out recycled versions of humanity, but what keeps humanity going is the progression of new, human ideas. AI will not replace us, because the breadth of humanity is irreplaceable.