Why Artists Are the Compass in the Coming AI Storms

Natural disasters have always been mysterious. Storms, forest fires, bug invasions, hurricanes, have long been the target of fascination and frustration.

Frustration, because we don’t understand them. We don’t know what to make of them.

And who, among humans, is tasked with making sense of what doesn’t ?

Artists, of course.

To get a natural disaster, you need two things : Power, and Mystery.

Let’s face the facts. People are being sucked into their screens, more and more. Over 48 % of the global population are considered addicted to their phones. If current habits continue, the average student could spend 25 years of their life on their phone.

This doesn’t include VR, TV, console games, and so on. This is the unstoppable current of history, ugly as it may be. Screens will completely dominate our perception in the future. And this is also true for sounds : around 45% of UK adults currently report that they use headphones or earphones.

And, as someone who is surrounded by neuroscientists everyday, I know how scarily close we are to inducing smell, touch and taste, just in the same way.

So nearly our entire sensuous experience will be overtaken by the digital. And guess who is the ultimate generator of digital content ?

Generative AI.

As time passed, we replaced our beloved mountains, trees and creeks with blocks, streets and street lamps. Some of us still visit nature, and there are parks in cities. But the dominant elements now are graffiti and straight lines. In the same way, the transition from real-world living to digital living will happen, perhaps to an even greater degree.

As we spend less and less time in nature, and our screens wrap around us in a warm, productive embrace, AI will become a foundational aspect of every human being’s experience — causing us pain, hope, happiness, and love. This is how AI will gain POWER over us.

This is from John Muir, the great explorer :

“The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop away from you like the leaves of autumn. This is the magic of the wilderness”

And from Arthur C. Clarke, a renowned science fiction writer :

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”

It is said that the more advanced we become, the more we forget how everything works. As an AI researcher myself, I’ve said multiple times that the only reason AI has got so far is because we gave up on understanding it. We let it learn on its own !

But since we don’t understand it, and its behavior is inherently random, it will inevitably do things we don’t expect. And coupled with the power over our perception that AI is going to have, this will create the new natural disasters.

It’s hard to imagine for now. But there are early signs. We already get the idea with slightly silly cases, like AI girlfriends having a bad update and everyone becoming depressed. This is a very early glimpse of what’s to come.

All in all, the new natural disasters will be caused by the whims and wishes of an AI we don’t understand. They will feel to us as world-shattering and shocking as do the strong winds at the very top of the highest mountains.

One of my all-time favorite quotes is from Søren Kierkegaard :

Life can only be understood backwards ; but it must be lived forwards

This, to me, is the core of the artist’s role in the age of AI. As reality becomes more and more unnatural and confusing, and as the limitations of science are on display, we have no recourse to make sense of the world. When this happens, people reach for something deeper, and Artists are tasked with probing the depths to supply this deeper thing.

But what YOU will provide as an artist will be more than just emotional support, or magic rituals. Read on…

To recap, just as the inner workings of nature and the universe are only partly known to us, so will it be of the functions of AI and all the tech universe. And because we will be surrounded by all-powerful AIs, their unintended quirks and emergent properties will come down upon us as great catastrophes. The world will seem just as chaotic as it was before the scientific revolution. Miserable. Confusing.

And as humans do, we will try to make sense of it. Understand it.

But this won’t be science’s role.

Science has only ever been able to deal with things that were pre-chewed by artists, and then philosophers. I have a post scheduled about that, so subscribe if you’re interested !

In a couple hundred years, there will be an enlightenment, where we will understand the rules of our new, strange digital universe. But it all will have been possible, only because of the early work of artists like you, in the 21st century. People who understood their mission before anyone else.

Cave painters made sense of a chaotic, unpredictable, dangerous world. Step up, artists. Just like them, you’re about to become the drivers of the whole ship.

If you get anything from this, consider restacking. I would love to know what people think.

Until next time.

ArtPostAI.