Lynn sent me a Facebook Reel a few days ago. It’s linked here. She sent it to me via Messenger, commenting “Very Strange. Amazing imagination.” Indeed, it is.
The visuals are stunning and interesting. The song is haunting and the mental pictures the words evoke are excellent, though the story of Betrayal (the song’s title) is more negative than where I like to focus my attention on what happens in life. If I were writing the song, I’d write about rejoicing that I got rid of the bum. Still, the artistry in both the graphics and the music are beautiful and worthy of recognition.
But it’s obvious to me, and probably everyone over the age of 5 years old today, that it’s an Artificial Intelligence (AI) created video. It’s harder to determine that with the song, but because the author calls herself an “AI artist/creator” I’d bet money the words to the song was also written by AI.
One of my first thoughts when I watched it was a stark realization that children born in the last 5 years are never really going to know what’s real and what’s not. Even today, far too many human beings are fooled by things they hear and see. Things that aren’t even remotely real. Things that are created, in some way, to influence and drive how they think and feel. Which is just about everything. I’ve written posts in this blog about that in the past.
There’s a cultural hullabaloo today about whether AI will destroy civilization. Literally. Like in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey where HAL, an Artificial Intelligence computer (although they didn’t call it artificial intelligence back then), starts thinking the astronauts intend to shut him down so he sets out to kill them first. People think that once AI is trained to think for themselves, they’ll set out to take over the world.
Maybe that could happen, I don’t know. I think of AI as a tool right now. AI has to come by all its information somewhere, which means (I think) it has to be programmed in, or learned. I hear of people creating their own AI programs which seems to mean to me that they’re just teaching a machine everything they know. Then the computer can process and return the information faster.
I liken it to when we used to have to go to the library to do research. It would take hours and hours and hours to find and look through and read the knowledge we sought through voluminous books and encyclopedias. In my high school history class, I might have been given 6 weeks to research and write the final assignment for the semester.
Now a kid can just say, “Siri, write me a 5,000 word essay about the Great Wall of China.” In 10 minutes, they can print a paper to turn in for their final sophomore year history assignment. And they won’t have learned one stinking thing.
The anthropological (relating to the study of humanity) challenge is where does this take the human race? I like having all of the knowledge of history in that little aqua covered box I carry around all day long. But at age 70, intensely curious all my life, I have the advantage of having questioned everything. I still do. On top of that I spent 23 years before we moved to Florida living in Missouri, the “Show Me” state. I don’t take anything at face value.
As the Age of AI dawns (and yes, I wrote that myself) I am grateful for my skepticism. I see and hear people argue about things that I know can’t possibly be true, or real. But you can’t convince them otherwise. I know what some of you who know me well are thinking. You’ve heard me talk about lots of what you think are very kooky things that I think can be real.
Sometimes bits and pieces (like soundbites) seem crazy or impossible, but to get the REAL picture, you have to put those bits of information in context. That means looking at it from a 40,000-foot view to see how it all fits together. Then you have to connect the dots and look at the motivation for the source of the information. You have to learn and practice discernment.
We, societally, have been groomed for years to believe and accept unreal and impossible things. “Relativism” burst on the cultural scene years ago, the concept that knowledge, truth, and morality exist in relation to culture, society, or historical context, and are not absolute. When people bought into that, you can understand how easy it was to convince them that the people who believe there are 47 genders are just experiencing their own reality. Who are we to say that they’re wrong? It is the old story of the jar of warring ants…the real question is: who’s shaking the jar?
AI is just another tool in the evolution of the war to exert power and control over humanity. That war is not new, but AI is an incredibly powerful weapon. In the future, no one will be able to discern reality. How do you fight back against something intangible and not real? How do we keep our freedom? Will we even know what freedom means? Does it matter? So many people just don’t want to know, and don’t care whether there’s truth and reality in their lives. And maybe that’s ok. Who am I to judge?
The movie, The Matrix, is cited often these days as society moves through these stages and asks these questions. In The Matrix, the story line is that everything in life is a computer simulation, a construct of an intelligent machine’s power over humans, who are the machine’s power source. The protagonist of the movie must make a choice to take the blue pill (to continue living in the simulation, presumably fat, dumb, and happy) or the red pill (to see the world as it really is, a harsh reality where human are enslaved by machines). The blue pill represents a comfortable reality and blissful ignorance, the red pill a difficult reality.
As I get closer to the end of my life, blissful ignorance is certainly appealing but intellectually dishonest. Enslavement of humanity is not a hopeful future for our children. Without taking that red pill, understanding what is happening to us, our children are doomed to be controlled forever. Theoretically, only with the understanding of reality is it possible to break out of life-long enslavement.
I believe AI, the powerful tool that has been weaponized, is a major step toward the real possibility of life-long enslavement. Children born since about 2020 won’t be able to discern reality from simulation. They’ll have little opportunity to learn discernment. They’ll be discouraged, perhaps even prevented, as we are beginning to be today, from studying history so we can learn from it and not repeat its mistakes.
Now the question is what to do about it. We who still understand reality have responsibility to do what we can to stop it now. And I think those who are calling out the baloney that it is are trying to do that. It’s a tough battle in this war to save humanity. I pray for them.
I do think humanity has destroyed itself over and over again for eons. I believe it’s a cycle repeated more than once on this planet. And that we’re not more than a generation or two, the generations who won’t recognize reality, from destroying current civilization. Sooner or later, like HAL, everything will implode and civilization is forced to start over.
How I long for more simple times.
P.S. Happy Thanksgiving! Enjoy the turkey while it comes from a real bird rather than being printed on a 3-D printer. For the record, I don’t know if the news that the meat in Campbell’s soup is printed on a 3-D printer (report is linked in the previous sentence) is true. But it reinforces the point of this post. How the hell do you know whether anything is true or real anymore?
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