AI is taking us on dangerous journey with no say on final destination: Bird Lovegod

What would happen if you decided to travel but had no idea where? So you let some other people decide for you, based on what would most benefit them, not you. You might end up anywhere, and it might well be unpleasant, unsafe, and a foolish approach to travel.

When it comes to our collective future we have no idea where we want to go. There’s no vision of what an ideal world would look like. Personally, I think most people want relief from poverty, beautiful nature and environments, a good health service, a good education for our children, and rewarding and creative jobs. It’s pretty basic really.

Yet we are obsessed with creating world-changing technologies, without actually considering what those changes are likely to be and if we actually want them, need them, or will benefit from them.

Take the current obsession with AI. How does AI enable us to create a more utopian world? I'm sure it doesn't.

I think a proliferation of carpentry shops, pottery and ceramics classes, stone masonry, any creative industries, these would be of far higher value to our kind, far more useful, more satisfying.

I look at the beautiful architecture of the cathedrals, and I think there probably aren't enough skilled stonemasons and stained glass experts and carpenters in the whole of England to make even one of these buildings now. We are losing skills, and replacing them with technology that we don’t need and don’t understand. We create technology, not so it can help us get to utopia, but just to see what it can do, where it will take us. We are passengers.

Where will this new technology take us? That’s always the question. Clearly we have handed control of our destiny over to technology, and to the technology companies who exist only to exploit humanity for profit, and to a tiny number of technocrats who want to manipulate and control with themselves as the power.

We have no idea where we are going, all we are doing is blindly following where technology takes us, while starting to panic about the climate and all the other consequences of our lack of purposeful direction.

I believe AI in particular is empowering the dark side of humanity far more than the light. It’s accelerating war, cybercrime, fraud, hacking, deceptions, fake news, fake images and fake videos, and the benefits are so far unnoticeable or trivial.

Even the so-called benefits are not benefits. Replacing photographers, replacing skilled writers, replacing creativity with automated ‘content’. This is not progress. This is not advancement. This is retrograde, degenerative, foolish, and anti-human.

The strategy is doomed. We are creating technologies and then seeing where they take us and what they will do to the world. There is absolutely no way that approach will create utopia. Quite the opposite.

Why is there no conversation about what we want the future to be? If there were, perhaps then we could try to head in the right direction at least.