Cards on the table: I was once a committed technology nerd. In 1982 I got a Sinclair Z81; in 1984, a Spectrum. In 1987 I started a private enquiry agency. Mainly, we repossessed vehicles. It turned out that people could get intemperate when we took back their wheels, so we bought the new Motorola mobile phones. Now, when I was working solo, I could ring a colleague and have him join me in a deserted street to reduce the risk of ending up unconscious in it. The job became easier and less scary.
By this time we had an Amstrad PCW9512 word processor. It came with a daisy wheel printer that made a fine old racket. After a work trip, I would dictate my report for the client into a dictaphone. I wondered whether there was a better way to do this and discovered a device called a Psion Organiser that had rudimentary text editing software and could be attached to Mr Sugar’s kit with something called an RS232 cable. I bought them both.
Soon, while returning from jobs, I was composing my reports while my colleague drove the car. When I got home, I attached the Psion to the PCW and saw my text appear as if by magic on the screen of the Amstrad, ready to be topped and tailed and sent to the client the very same day. I was a very happy tech nerd.
By then, home computing was taking off. Companies began to use networked systems and prices came down. People were getting Windows home desktop systems. I took a different road and got a second-hand Atari STE. It was the start of a love affair. I got it upgraded to a then breathtaking maximum of four megabytes of RAM and attached a forty meg hard drive. The fan made nearly as much noise as our vacuum cleaner. By then I was no longer a private eye and my wife and I were wage slaves again. Like everyone else, we got a Windows PC, helping to make Bill Gates the world’s richest man. Those were the days.
At the Millennium, I got interested in ‘virtual reality’; just stitching photographs together to create the illusion of your presence at a remote location. Only Apple had the software to pull this off useably and I got my first Mac, a PowerMac G4. With it, I produced a virtual tour of part of a National Trust property that was inaccessible to the disabled – the first such use of it in the Trust. The onward march of technology had improved my capacity to use my intellect and education to earn a living, so for me, the revolution of computing for the masses was a success. How joyful and hopeful it all seemed back then.
So, to my point: the fall and corruption of an aspirational application of technology and human ingenuity. I date this from the appearance of Facebook, which I briefly used to regain contact with some members of my family. At this stage, Facebook seemed harmless enough; you could find people you had lost contact with and use it to form associations with people who shared your interests. What was not to like?
But Mr Zuckerberg had done a bad thing. He made Facebook pander to our self-indulgence and tendency to show off. The English wit Charles Lamb said that the greatest pleasure was to do a good deed by stealth and have it discovered by accident. With Mr Zuckerberg’s monstrous brainchild we could now show the whole world how noble and clever we were. It became a major vehicle for the sin of virtue signalling.
Zuckerberg was one of a new elite that now includes Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos and the rest. They, like me, were computer nerds. I am pretty sure that, also like me, they once wished fervently that they could be better at sports and more attractive to women. But ye Gods, how their ships have come in.
Zuckerberg and his friends now arguably run the world. They surely control the politics of the country where they made their unimaginable fortunes and whose economic tides can raise or lower them for everyone else. What is worse, they have used their billions to enthral Donald J Trump, one of the most dangerously stupid men ever to ascend the world stage, and who may yet preside over the fatal decline of capitalism.
Enter Sam Altman, billionaire owner of Open AI and Chat GPT, bumptious and hubristic champion of the new technology. I know little of it, but it will apparently revolutionise our ability to acquire and use knowledge with neural computer systems that emulate our brains and can learn and evolve by themselves. In short, to be like and replace us.
The race is on to get these networks to communicate and empathise with each other and with us, like real human beings. Altman says the prize will be the solution to all mankind’s problems and universal wealth. There will of course be untold riches for those who perfect it. Doubters say that all this jam promised for tomorrow may be inflating a market bubble that will inevitably burst and cause another global economic collapse.
AI is making marketing slicker and more aggressive. This may help someone trying to run or start a business, but ultimately it can only further enrich people whose wealth already skews all human intercourse.
Humans create art and seek scientific and moral truths by the exercise of intellect. Sometimes this ends in failure, but it is what defines us as sentient beings. It may be what we call a soul. Algorithms designed to replicate this miracle can produce a pap that satisfies some agreed definition or standard of thought and behaviour. It will sound right because its purpose is not to offend. It may be good enough to explain your new idea for a toothbrush or advertise your Air BNB. It may get you a pass in your history essay, but it’s not art, and it’s not science, because it didn’t come out of you. It is dishonest. It has no soul.
AI is replacing the human creative function, for profit. Its creators seem bent on replacing humans with machines, the very definition of dystopia. It will deny to many young people, starting what they hope is a lifetime of work the starter jobs that my smug generation took for granted when we started on that same path. How most of this can be regarded as anything other than a dystopian nightmare is surely the greatest mystery of our age.
Vast data centres which house the new technology are despoiling huge tracts of our already abused planet, using profligate amounts of precious electricity and water and poisoning the environments around them.
So, fuck you, Mr Altman, Mr Zuckerberg, Mr Musk and your preposterous friends. You have ruined something that was a boon to all, fun to use, and only did good. Your hubris and looting of it to exploit our frailties for even more profit will ruin us. I will fight you and the ridiculous notion that a computer can be like me, or ought to be like me, with every breath I have. I will teach my grandchild and all children I can influence that a computer is a thing they can switch on and off, does exactly what you tell it to do and must NEVER be allowed to think for you.
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