My take on AI advancements, for posterity's sake

There are so many advances that we have experienced throughout history that have allowed us greater ease in our processes and pathways. Yet we were not always welcoming of these advances out of lack of understanding or fear. I think of how when I was a child my teachers were hesitant to let us use calculators because we were not going to be able to understand the rudimentary math skills that had been passed on and taught throughout generations. Our predecessors felt it was important to contain the mechanisms of these skills within our personage. They felt it was important because all along history those deferring or failing to gain this skill would be at the mercy of those who did know how to execute mathematics, therefore giving them a greater chance of being taken advantage of. Take away that calculator once acclimated to it, and we no longer contain and pass on the knowledge of how to conduct this work. Yet, by the time I was in high school it was unthinkable to work math without a calculator and in some of the more advanced math courses, these calculators were essential. Yet, even now I wonder, how many of us would fare if we no longer had access to calculators? Have we advanced or have we simply deferred some of our capacities, relegating them to something externa to our being?

As another example, when I was younger before GPS and global satellite mapping systems, I had to learn to use a paper map and sit down and learn to follow the various roads and junctures to figure out how to best get somewhere. Even these paper maps were advances that took away our capacity to just wander through the countryside and landscapes and find and learn to self-navigate our pathways as the Indigenous people once had. We replaced one skill for another, but now reliance on GPS and/or mapsh has made people perhaps afraid or incapable of navigating without them and maybe rightfully so. Yet, haven't we washed away an inherent practical skill that we could call upon once as a part of our natural organic constructs? If GPS were to go down, could we find our way again easily? What about maps? Would we be able to navigate without them?

In this era of advancing emergent technology, there are some recent things that have emerged that have really hurt me personally when they have come forth and one has to wonder if there is greater benefit or greater detriment in their appearance. Two in particular that have really struck my heart include the AI that creates art by mimicking the profound and meaningful art that other people have made and second, the AI that can write/edit for people. 

I get it, we are all hazarded by the experiences of having an incapability at times to say or create visually or linguistically that something that conveys a deeper thing within us that we might not be able to articulate.  As a consequence of this incapacity, though, many of us have worked very hard to come to be able to reasonably possess these skills despite the road of hard knocks it often takes to be able to earn such a badge of capability. It has often come with hard work, and investing when we did not always have a ton of strength or courage or a belief in our capacity. For many creators or art and writing it meant straining against trials and mistakes and efforts that were not always commended or celebrated by others. It also perhaps meant having to hold that message within us for long spans of time that could before we could form and sculpt ourselves and our skills enough to come to find the wherewithal to even come close to perfect articulation.

I empathize with all of the seekers who wanted these AI to answer this inherent need in many of us to be able to speak our truths within and bring them to light in ways befitting what we think they should be. Yet, I perceive there are such costs. First, many of those who fed these systems were unwilling casualties of this advancing AI system they were feeding. They did not fully grasp or understand the rights they were giving up by sharing their creations via social media platforms. They did not grasp the intentions of the constructs of the machine that they would be sharing this information with and in the process lost some of the fruits of their most hard earned and often quite dearly laden efforts.

I also think there is a cost in having been given things too easily. If the path toward succinct articulation and therefore a capacity for creating objects of profundity of beauty or written works that carry a perception of greatness among our fellow human being are simply handed to us, then there is no use for us to continue to strive forth and to pursue greater contributions and greater measures of success. In losing the need for the drive, and in losing the need to cultivate the skills we forget their depth of value and worth.

Do we not steal from others who come after us the essential purposeful drive to be a party to the innate pains and thrilling epiphanies that allow us to impart the breath of life upon their works if we simply hand it off to them in such an abbreviatedly simple fashion? Do we not also stunt our own desire or capacity to strive, and grow as a result of having the want or need to bring something forth into this place of being if we simply defer it all to 'the machine'? Aren't we softer and gentler with each other when we understand some things the hard road toward gains that were earned via struggle and pains, and don't the hardships make the successes all the sweeter?  I am not a guru or a sage or someone who knows more than others, but I think that having really worked for something really makes us appreciate it all the more when we do finally climb to the pinnacle of the upper echelon of creation. I am not sure I would want that ability to find my voice and way of speaking through the process of creation to be taken away.

Just my two cents thrown in the pot for posterity's sake!