The Importance of Human Thought

 The Importance of Human Thought 

With apologies to all those in favour of it, I’m going to havea rant about my issues with Artificial Intelligence again. But this is somethingthat isn’t going to go away and I fear that, as so often with the human race,it is something we are plunging into without thinking about the consequences.

Because the major consequence, if we aren’t careful, will beto crush our ability for creative thought by giving it all to a computer.

I think I can speak for many when I saw that jobs that don’tinvolve brain work are not very stimulating. Mindlessly copying or inputtingdata into a computer, repetitive tasks – this is work that pays bills but doesn’tignite passion or indeed brain cells. Where jobs become interesting, wherepeople become enthused, is where thought is involved – analysis, diagnosis,assessment, creativity, imagination, problem solving, projection, discovery, inspiration,whatever you want to call it, whatever kind of work it is and whatever form ittakes, it is the spark in a working life.

AI has no spark because AI has no imagination. All its humanqualities come from humans ourselves, artificially grafted on and input fromexisting human creativity to create an illusion of inspiration based oncenturies of our brain work. But what it can do is simulate our ability tothink and do so quickly, simulate our ability to create art, writing, music butsoullessly and make life easy for those who did not previously have the capabilityof creating such things themselves.

So AI can replace human thought in a working capacity. Butone thing it still needs is someone to mindlessly input the data. So if we aren’tvery, very careful, we will end up leeching all of the joy and the passion outof working life by handing all the thinking to the computer and leaving ourselveswith nothing to do but mindlessly feed it information. We will turn ourselvesinto the unthinking drudges letting the computers do all the fun part ofexisting for us. We’re only a few short steps away from being the human race asshown in the Disney film WALL-E – and that’s the best case scenario!

I am aware how melodramatic I must sound. But listening tothe news talking about developing AI to create jobs – it will create short termjobs for computer specialists, but it will wipe out other, less specialised,people’s jobs altogether. Look at the Customer Service industry and how hard itis to get passed useless and uncaring chat bots pretending to be people tospeak to an actual human being. It used to be people manning those helplines,what’s happened to them? Business will always replace people with cheapersoftware it doesn’t have to pay or worry about treating properly if it can. Itwill make it harder for those without good qualifications or specialist skills tofind work. It will either take the jobs of those people or make them mindlesslydull. And I’m sorry to sound harsh but business will cheerfully let it if theirprofit margin increases.

We need to be careful at the moment – we are only a fewsteps away from crushing human creativity and taking all the small pleasure outof life for millions if not billions of people. And that isn’t a world I wantto see.