The AI revolution and dilemma.

Written by TR Johns

The technologies of the 21st Century are developing a global economic system, communications and social infrastructures that are the stuff of dreams. The internet has facilitated freedom of speech and exchanges of information across the world, hitherto inconceivable. The scale of engagement is without precedent. Social media platforms compete for the attention of billions around the world (eg Facebook, 3 billion active monthly users), whilst Large Language Models (eg ChatGPT, LLaMa, Claude) are promising revolution for business, education, the Arts and beyond. They are not neutral places or products, all dependent on continual financing.

Social media platforms pursue three goals, in their profit-driven business models: engagement (time spent on-line), growth (finding new users) and revenue (maximizing returns from advertisements). The success of platforms like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Wechat runs into trillions of dollars. Their operations hinge on the tracking of on-line actions, measuring and recording through powerful AI engines with sophisticated algorithms. Progressively they have improved the accuracy of predictions about what we do, how we think and who we are! They are programmed in methods of manipulation, for commercial gain.

Competition fuels a race dynamic for market dominance, with the potential to push next generation products into society prematurely. In 2023, critical issues of safety, risk and unknown emergent capabilities were flagged regarding generative AI. Due to its capacity and speed, designers recognised the risk of asking AI to do things that we do not fully understand with consequences which we cannot foresee. Given the unprecedented double-exponential acceleration that AI brings, it is argued that public deployment must go hand in hand with open debate about the new responsibilities, language, philosophy and regulatory laws required to manage it appropriately. ‘Slow down’ was the plea. Already the combination of speed of technological change, legislative lag and a lack of clarity regarding societal values, has created a dysfunctionality which urgently needs addressing.

The 2016 Brexit referendum and last two US elections revealed how profit-based algorithms, devoid of ethical checks and balances, could be ‘weaponised’, bringing the worst out in society. A flawed business model, toxic financial incentives, shareholder pressures, and corruption from malevolent and nefarious participants rule. Liberal democracies need to put their digital house in order.

Perhaps the balance of power should be moved away from private sector individuals into the hands of Government? The internet’s founder, Tim Berners-Lee, was adamant that it should be ‘free to all and no-one should own it.’ The absence of central oversight has been the very thing allowing technologies to transform how the world communicates and lives. However, in lacking a regulator or model of governance, and following woefully inadequate self-regulation, can it remain fit for purpose? The world-wide-web is also reaching the limits of its technical prowess, with security, reliability and configuration problems.

The West faces a conundrum; it values democratic freedoms and rights, and mistrusts, with clear historical reason, the threat of totalitarianism. It benefits from the most liberating technology that the world has ever known, yet it has become enslaved to it, trapped by a form of capitalism that is obsessed with quarterly and year-on-year growth. Social media and AI applications have already engineered deep fractures in social order, including the manipulation of public dialogue, the disruption of democracy and surveillance issues. Inappropriate generative AI has the potential to destroy the entire infrastructure of western society.

Let’s remember AI is neither artificial nor intelligent. It operates a digested data set, regurgitated with no innate understanding, based on mathematical formulae. Without ethics or conscience, it can produce convincing fabrications and generate its own fabricated sources. Through unintended consequences, the internet risks evolving into a quicksand of deep fake information, half-truths, and clones, to a degree where it is unusable. The authenticity of synthetic media could no longer be trusted or verifiable. Were this to happen, our shared online reality would unravel before our eyes!

To complicate matters further, the democratisation of information has become a quasi-religious philosophy, with multiple social, economic and political forces at play. Is the West is so entrenched in its rights and freedoms, that it is unable to contemplate or exercise a generational ‘reset’? The genie cannot re-enter the bottle, through deconstructing some of the world’s biggest companies, rather it must release a surge of collaborative creativity and resourcefulness to find socially responsible solutions. Forums like the AI Now Institute are invaluable, as is the realisation that expecting tomorrow to be like today, is blindness. Despite the stability of the recent past, change is on its way.

In 2019, Huawei presented to the UN agency, the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), proposals for a New IP (internet protocol). The intention is a global network, with a top-down design, to replace the technological architecture of www. which has dominated the last 50 years. To be launched in 2030, it will address the controversy over internet governance by putting control back into the hands of Governments and removing power from the US mega-corporations. China makes no bones about introducing networks with an embedded system of centralised rule enforcement. It provides an infrastructure to give absolute control to totalitarian governments, favoured by countries such as Russia, Saudia Arabia, Iran and African dependents. Such a prospect gives cause for deep unease.

The gauntlet is down, and the sand is running through the timer. The complexity of resolving multi-faceted and multi-layered issues, with multiple stakeholders, may simply be too challenging for the mechanisms of liberal democracy. Caught up by clamouring voices and domestic disarray, absorbed and distracted by global events and climatic dilemmas, the age of American digital imperialism could be ending.

The continued harvesting of human data labelled the ‘dispossession cycle’ by Shoshana Zuboff,[i] poses a deep cultural threat. Whether by Big Tech or by Big Government, its ominous tentacles are suffocating the rights of individual self-determination. Will Big Tech be remembered as the liberators or handmaidens to authoritarianism?

References

[i] The Age of Surveillance Capitalism – Shoshana Zuboff. 2019. Public Affairs Books: London