What If A.I. Just Disappoints Us?
What is Artificial Intelligence just stays dumb? What if, after all, it's a nothing burger and all the promises don't happen and it fades into the background?
In the current, effervescent bubbling hype around Artificial Intelligence (AI) the stories we see tend to be either a wonderful utopia ahead or the end of humanity. Neither are likely. AI is going to change our societies and cultures, as technologies have done since our ancestors chipped tools from stones. We can only speculate on how for now.
Perhaps we need to think from another perspective on this wild rollercoaster ride of AI today? Maybe we might also ask what would happen if AI doesn’t pan out? What if it flails, flounders about a bit and then sort of quietly fizzles? A little engine that couldn’t.
Let’s take a wander down the path where AI didn’t quite turn out as either the proclaimers or the doomsayers predicted and ends up a nothing burger. Or perhaps just a plain old burger that tastes fine but like a greasy spoon is just somewhere we sometimes go. When we’re hungry but can’t make a decision and the AI can’t either. Or doesn’t want to.
Anything is possible with any technology. In our history, there is a far longer trail of failed technologies than of successful ones. They fail for many reasons, sometimes just one, more often for several. Cultural or societal rejection, being leapfrogged by another technology (horse, car thing), market forces, technological evolution and so on.
There’s a very real possibility that we just won’t be able to generate enough electricity to make AI work at the imagined scale of today. Maybe we won’t reach that breakthrough in quantum computing necessary to process the volumes of data AI needs to feast on. Maybe we’ll reach a limit with AI chips?
AI isn’t just thirsty for data, it is thirsty for water. From chip manufacturing to data centre cooling. We are already running low on water and I suspect we will choose to quench our own thirst, grow our own food, before we feed and water AI.
What if too, it turns out that today’s Generative AI, tools like Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini, don’t get that much better. Maybe they end up being what some have called them, a race to mediocrity. Image generators just end up creating beige images. Maybe the music they create just can’t beat out Taylor Swift, Rhianna or Beyonce?
What if brands turn over all their customer service and support to chatbots, then all the consumer chatbots just talk to the brand chatbots and all the humans go live off grid and decide they want to use landline telephones again? Or smoke signals. That would be fun.
Generative AI has been out in the wild of the world for nearly two years now and well, not much in the greater scheme of things has really changed. Talk of massive job losses is nothing but predictions and forecasts and they are always wrong. No industries have collapsed and none are near to doing so. Fingers hands and faces are still disappearing on AI generated videos. They’re still adding fingers too. Maybe AI is predicting humans will grow a sixth finger on one hand?
Generative AI is hallucinating more than hippies on LSD did in the 1960s. It’s making up more fake facts than politicians. The only real emergence from Generative AI isn’t the AI tools, it’s our growing distrust.
Perhaps the AI tools that we do end up using just do the work that we actually want them to do, that some already do quite well and we don’t think about them. Like detecting cancer, creating new antibiotics, solving complex environmental management problems. What if those AI tools like Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing just reach a limit or a point where we decide that they’re fine as they are?
What if it turns out that Artificial Intelligence does the really boring stuff that we don’t want to or have to do and it just sort of hums along in the background like the power transformer in the neighbourhood or the quiet thrum of a car engine on the highway? It gets you there, safe and without too much fuss.
What would we do then? Perhaps we’d chuckle a bit under our breath as we looked back at our collective societal angst, seeing ourselves as we were in high school, all goofy, weird and riddled with anxieties.
Maybe too, we would learn something new about what it means to be human. Perhaps we’d have greater awareness and perhaps AI would rest quietly, comfortable in its unknowable limitations. Happy algorithms just helping us along. Perhaps because the invisible hand of culture decided we wanted some boundaries. Human culture has always, ultimately decided on how we will shape a technology that once shaped us. Why should AI being anything different?
This is neither good nor bad. It just is. It’s a possibility. What if, in the end, AI doesn’t turn out to be much of anything? Just a washed up hard drive begging for Bitcoin on a digital street corner on the internet.