cadaxa

AI is not pure evil, few tools are. There are people who benefit from AI. Engineers, obviously, are a group who benefit, in various ways. Writers also benefit by using AI to revise their work so that it fits particular standards. AI allows access to language that is not accessible to everyone. Not everyone has the educational opportunities to learn dominant language forms. If AI allows someone from an underprivileged background to get a job, get into college, or succeed in some way they otherwise wouldn’t have, then AI has served as an equalizer in an unequal system.

I begin here because I don’t want to stubbornly refuse to acknowledge the positives or shame people for using AI. I’m also not going to proceed with a master list of negatives about AI in an attempt to persuade you with the “cold hard facts,” so to speak (although, if you are interested in such a list, this video by Hank Green does a great job of outlining many concerns).

What I want to do instead is to focus on a broader question using AI as an example: what is enough? I’m going to interrogate the notion of progress in the process of thinking through this question.

Progress

Progress assumes a concept of time. There was a time, in the past, when things were bad. Things are better now, and they will continue to get better in the future. The horizon–a source of hope, and a promise that there is always something better and more beautiful if we keep going. We will manifest our destiny.

Obviously this idea has been a basis for conquest, but it is not an inherently imperial idea. It all depends on the underlying values. If progress is defined as movement toward the value of, say, personal wealth, then the pilfering and seizing of land and resources are acts of Progress. If progress is instead defined as something else, like creating better living conditions for as many people as possible, then progress might look like free universal healthcare and increased access to housing.

Whatever values lie in the foundation of your notion of progress, you still must accept time as a co-conspirator in the progress project. But does this mean that the aspirations of progress can ever be truly achieved? Is there a time when we stop the progress project, look at each other and smile because it’s over? Seems unlikely. Imagine your perfect world comes to fruition. What then? Surely there is something you will be doing next. Progress is Sisyphean in nature. Yet, change does occur, and I think when it’s faster and more complex, we have less control over it.

This is part of what concerns me the most about AI. The fact that we can’t trace where information, ideas, and language forms come from. It comes across as disconnected from people, but it is not. It is the product of people. Like a mangled shared dream, spitting out bits of consciousness. It is difficult enough as individual people to trace back the influences on our minds, why we think the way we think.

Progress is a type of directed change. AI makes the “directed” part more difficult. For whatever it is we wish to achieve, AI will not take us there faster. It will take us along fast, for sure, but to where? I do not know. I am afraid to find out.

It seems to me that if we accept there will never be a time when “enough” is achieved, we can relax into the slow, complex process of doing our best in the moment we exist in now.