We, Myself, and AI

If you’re looking for Luddites, I would probably not be the best place to start. I was a child of the New Frontier – that heartbreakingly brief moment at the dawn of the Space Age, when progress and idealism dared to defy the cynics who are only content when all those around them are as hopeless as they are.

My grade school friends and I knew the names of the Mercury 7 astronauts. We were riveted by the National Geographic that introduced us to holography. When we walked out of the Cinerama in Omaha after seeing 2001: A Space Odyssey, our first thought was how soon we could get back to see it again.

I was sending and receiving email on my job as a multimedia producer as early as 1985. That same year, I scripted a documentary about the electronics genius, Nikola Tesla. By 1993, I was chatting with virtual friends on my dial-up modem. I helped pioneer the field of online learning, working virtually for over 20 years with clients and colleagues all over the world.

So how does someone so demonstrably comfortable with technology end up writing The Future Lies, a novel that places an Artificial Intelligence (AI) network at the center of a dystopia in which literacy is a capital offense, and humanity exists on the level of barnyard animals? By doing what any good satirist would do – exaggerating the status quo, and projecting it a step or two into the future.

And yet, why? I think it’s because I’ve lived long enough to embrace the promise of technology, only to witness how empty that promise can be. To experience the thrill of the first photo of Earth from the Moon…and the disgust as billionaires litter the edges of space with their egos and their trash. To watch the ethos of Silicon Valley devolve from counterculture egalitarianism to libertarian selfishness and greed. And to observe the internet degenerate from its earnest potential to a medium that is monetized to amplify humanity at its worst.

So I’ve kept a wary eye on AI for quite a few years now. I have not been able to shake the feeling that AI might represent an inflection point between computers as relatively benign tools that service humanity, and a more malevolent digital product designed to replace humanity with itself.

It's too soon to tell whether AI is the new apex predator…or the new cryptocurrency. But there’s enough palpable menace that it seemed like an ideal antagonist for a novel set in the latter years of this century. And that its role might more closely resemble Big Brother in nineteen eighty-four than HAL in 2001.

If AI becomes a ubiquitous part of our lives, it’s likely that among other things, it will integrate itself with the “Internet of Things,” which currently exists as a collection of Alexa-type digital assistants, Ring doorbell cams, Nest thermostats, smart phones and cars, facial recognition scans, cloud computing, and touchless currency – all fueled by our wholesale surrender of personal information. It’s not hard to imagine these and other tendrils evolving into a unified entity, managed and made sentient by some form of AI.

That is “the Network” as I envision it in The Future Lies. The humans who exist in its shadow are, for the most part, hopelessly outmatched and irrelevant. My story imagines what might happen if a few of the young adults in that world decide to challenge those power dynamics.

But I think that’s an equally important idea for our current moment in time. Because I see our biggest risks not just from the technologies we so relentlessly create, but to our unthinking acquiescence to those technologies; our willingness to exchange our privacy, our freedom, and our agency, for low-value conveniences.

If we lose the war to technology, it will be with hardly a shot fired in our own defense. At least when the atom was split, the next move was not to hand every living person free access to reactors they could carry around in their pockets. Whereas ChatGPT…just casually walked out of the skunkworks and into the App Store one day.

This is far from unique in our deregulated world. For less than the cost of an iPad, you, me, or anyone else – can actually edit DNA at home now, with our very own mail-order CRISPR kit. ("BioHack the Planet!") What could possibly go wrong?

My concern is not “technology” in and of itself. Without tools, we might still seek our shelter in caves. AI could end up providing the final keys needed to eradicate hunger and disease. Or let’s think even bigger – maybe AI will help us evolve beyond willful ignorance and intolerance. Or maybe it won’t. Maybe we’ll allow it to become the tool that uses us, not the other way around.

As it currently stands, AI is a product of us humans. Conceived and created by us. Nourished by the patterns and products of our very own minds, for better and worse. There are early signs that the “worse” might include the death-spiral acceleration of our collective stupidity.

But it remains, for now at least, within our power to contain it, so that it serves our purposes, at the exclusion of its own. This will require regulations and lawsuits that protect human interests – including the intellectual property currently harvested without permission or compensation, which AI devours as part of its training.

In the meantime, I remain a product of the New Frontier. I still believe in progress and ideals. And therefore, I refuse to abandon all hope.

The future lies, waiting. Make of it what we will.