Utilize don’t Humanize

This article is a follow up to my previous article titled Do we have an Ethical Obligation to be Kind to AI? I think we have an Ethical Obligation to save our soul. Once that article was published I got feedback from readers either sharing more eye opening and worrisome AI  content or sharing how suddenly they have begun to see AI everywhere, in places and ways, that they have never been aware of before. What I have learned since I wrote my original article has made me double down on my caution of not interacting with AI in a way that humanizes it.

A teenager shared that Snapchat is inconspicuously pushing a bot, called My AI, to appear in a subscriber’s list of friends. The bot, My AI, prompts the user to chat, have fun, and ask it questions as a best friend would. This snapchat “bestie” can recommend gift ideas, suggest recipes, and plan a day trip. Snapchat is using this AI as a “test” to see the user feedback and engagement with this new technology. And with as much as anything else this “experimental feature” is being tested out on teenagers, the most vulnerable group to social contagions. Studies on social media have repeatedly tied the increased use of social media in young people to increased incidence of depression, anxiety, and distractions, as well as peer pressure, an unrealistic look at people’s lives and an amplified tendency towards social isolation. Now with the advent of My AI, and other artificial intelligence type of interactions, the need for a real life human friend, and the tools needed to build strong communications and relationships with breathing living souls, will diminish even more.

In 2016, Sophia- a humanoid robot, and her two “sisters” Grace and Desdemona, gained widespread attention for their human like looks and expressions. Of course, as I highlighted in my previous article, there is definitely a place for AI in some context, such as being a “friend” to someone suffering from late stage dementia such that they can repeatedly be asked the same question over and over again without losing interest in the person, we still have to be incredibly wary of their implications on our privacy, and human connections. The more human like they make these robots-with voices, expressions, gestures, and smiles – the more comfortable and accustomed we become with interacting with technology. This can have deleterious effects. These algorithms can create an “echo chamber” that re-enforces our attention and polarizes society. We are literally programmed to no longer think for ourselves.

With Google bringing AI to Gmail and docs, Microsoft bringing AI to word, excel, and power point, and AI being used in the workplace to match the skills required for the job to the skills of the candidates as shown on their resumes, they are removing the need for human beings to do those processes and getting to know candidates on an intuitive level. As these machines are getting better us humans are getting dumber.

This whole subject has made me think and take a deeper dive into the World Economic Forum as well. WEF, The World Economic Forum is an international non-governmental lobbying organization based in Switzerland, founded by a German engineer named Klaus Schwab. The WEF wants us to believe that they are bringing together decision-makers from across the globe to work on initiatives that make a difference. On the forefront of those initiatives is transhumanism, a term coined by Julian Huxley Julian, a man who was the president of the British Eugenics Society and an ardent supporter of eugenics ideology.

A decade later, he wrote a book called, ‘New Bottles for New Wine’, explaining that advances in technology had led to a “new eugenics,” which he referred to as the “merging of man and machine,” otherwise known as transhumanism.

Since then transhumanism has gained traction, with many of its supporters being people that historically have had ties to the eugenics movement, such as Schwab, who developed the term The Fourth Industrial Revolution, which brings in human-machine symbiosis.

One of Schwab’s top advisers, an Israeli scientist by the name of Yuval Noah Harrari, explicitly admits that data might enable globalists to do more than “just build digital dictatorships.” Via technology in the form of wearables and implants – like brain chips and that AI can one day spy on our very own thoughts.

He goes on to say that “Humans are now hackable animals”. And that we think that because we have a soul and a spirit that we somehow have free will. That since we can choose who to elect or what to buy at a supermarket we have free will, but he continues with the words “that’s over.”

Eventually, the goal is to make implantable devices capable of reading our thoughts as common as having a cell phone. When social media apps such as Snapchat already have an AI “best friend,” and people live in Facebooks’ metaverse, is it really not that difficult to imagine that treating humans as hackable animals is the next natural progression of AI – if we let down our guard. As a matter of fact Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are working on brain-computer interfaces that could pick up thoughts directly from our neurons and translate them into words in real time. The idea is that really soon we would be able to control our phones and computers with our thoughts alone.

Harari, at one of the WEF gatherings, proclaimed that technology getting into our body and being capable of surveilling our thoughts is the line that the world crosses into digital dictatorship – “where the leadership will be able to know what you really think about them and what you really think about issues”. “And if you don’t agree” – to use his words –“you’ll end up in the Gulag the next morning”.

We are already aware that many AI algorithms comb through data of our internet activity by making suggestions on what we should buy based on a recent search we did, recipes based on the latest cooking site we visited and can profile us in countless ways, how much more deleterious if we invite this type of surveillance into our bodies. We are crossing a red line into a tech-fueled totalitarian state that would be difficult to ever emerge from.

I will end with prophetic words given by Klaus Schwab during his latest speech at the World Economic Summit “when we move into the exponential phase, and I agree artificial intelligence, but not only artificial intelligence but also the metaverse, neo space technologies, and I can go on and on… our lives 10 years from now will be completely different and very much effected. And who masters those technologies in some way, will be the master of the world.” 

What can you do? The most obvious way to stop it would be to not comply. These technologies are marketed as being extremely convenient, but the less we comply, and more so the less we humanize and interact with these technologies as we would a living breathing human with a soul,  the less successful the very explicit agenda will be. Everything is always done under the guise that it is good for humanity, public health… It’s all tied up with the right words and a pretty pink bow. But if something is morally or environmentally detrimental- just say no!