Can We Stop Our Future From Being Dystopian?

I have very distinct technological memories in my life:

1. Making banners and greeting cards using Print Shop on our Apple IIe

2. Sitting 2 feet away from the television so I could reach more easily to change the channel or adjust the volume

3. Teaching myself HTML

4. My dad, who worked in printing, bringing home Photoshop 2.0 on a floppy disk

5. Purchasing my first iMac in 2001 so I could work on college projects at home

6. Playing with the first iPhone before it was available for customers (I worked for Apple Retail)

I also have very distinct non-technological memories:

1. Streetlight illumination determining when I should go home if I was playing outside with neighbors

2. Coming home from concerts reeking of cigarette smoke

3. Using a card catalog to find books at the library

4. Cursive writing homework

5. Looking up someone’s address in the phone book

6. Learning how to develop film

Xennials, Gen Y, “The Oregon Trail Generation”—whichever name you choose—have lived their lives bridging two different worlds. Their childhood world was slow and deliberate, where there was relative ignorance about things going on outside of the present moment. Their young adult world marked the dawn of personal technology, like home computers and game consoles, and the possibilities were exciting. Xennials were introduced to technology at an age that has been determined to be the most beneficial. Not too young that learning it was very difficult nor too old to have any hesitations about using it.

As the latest news about chatGPT and GPT3 rolls out, I’ll admit that for the first time since the potential meltdown of Y2K I actually have some fear around technology. Rather than let my fear run unchecked, I decided to dive in to learn more about what this technology is and what the plans are for it.

Instead of multiple Google searches for articles like I usually do, I wanted to step outside of the internet and go into the podcast world. I tried as much as possible to avoid confirmation bias and chose episode names that seemed to reflect various viewpoints. I listened to one episode from each of these six podcasts: McKinsey on AI, This Day in AI, The Cognitive Revolution, SuperDataScience Podcast, The Ezra Klein Show, and AI Literacy. (I’ll note that the last one in the list was the only woman-led show.)

The subject matter of the episodes was all over the board, yet there was one common thread that was woven through most of the shows: guardrails, policies, and regulations will be absolutely crucial in AI’s development, and in the hands of “bad actors” this technology could be incredibly dangerous. Not necessarily in a “start WWIII” kind of way, more like a “we will struggle to discern truth from fiction” kind of way.

The problem we face isn’t the technology; it’s humanity.

I had such a mixed reaction to hearing this message over and over. I felt vindicated that my fears weren’t unfounded, but also crushed that the overwhelming answer to this problem seems to be that we would collectively have to shift from how we are operating currently as a society in order for this technology to be the improvement in our lives that it’s meant to be.

On “Getting the feels: Should AI have empathy?” from McKinsey on AI, Minter Dial, author of Heartificial Empathy and former head of the Redken brand at L’Oreal, said:

There is now a study that shows that businesses that have empathy within their culture and towards the customer will have a net positive benefit on the bottom line and that shows up in the shareholder stock price. In the study they evaluated 170 publicly traded companies and on a range of some like 50 criteria evaluated them on their empathic ability. The top 10 with empathy outperformed by two times on the stock market than the bottom ten.

Nearly every word of that statement makes my blood pressure rise. The first thing that came to mind was how on earth are we ever going to improve our world when there are people saying the words empathy and shareholder stock price in the same sentence? Profit gains are the reason why we should care about each other?

I promised myself that I would hang in with listening to the episodes no matter how upset they made me, so I kept going.

The end of the episode gave me that “set down the book and stare at the wall” feeling when you read something that strikes you.

Host: As our conversation came to a close I wondered if the very act of teaching AI systems to be more empathic would help humanity in general become more empathic as well.

Dial: The truth is I think the very journey of trying to encode empathy into AI can shine a light on our own level of empathy. Why do we want to do it? What is our interest in doing that? Are we actually empathic or are we trying to delegate the empathy to something else because we're not capable? And in the very process of trying to figure out what is the code that we should be embedding into AI, maybe we’re going to start understanding better what is empathy in the first place.

There is an enormous amount to unpack there because what’s being said has a very corporate lecture feel-good tone to it. If you were only surface listening to this you could walk away feeling that AI is going to lead us toward being better humans because it will allow us to question what we value most about our humanity and then build from those values. I chose to look beyond the surface into the specifics of the statement.

He’s not a programmer, so his use of “we” in regards to the journey of encoding is confusing. Did he mean we as humans in general or we in reference to those who are the developers of the technology? Is he thinking that we should just wing it and see how it goes, like we did with social media? That somehow we can reverse engineer society into being more empathic by creating technology that has empathy? And what about the people who are worried about the shareholder stock price and the bottom line? Are they they ones who want to delegate empathy to AI because they don’t have any themselves? If so, isn’t that a pretty big problem?

All of these questions brought me back to my feelings about bridging two different worlds. I greatly enjoy that I could set one of my lamps to come on automatically at a specific time every day because sometimes I get so sucked into things, like writing, that I end up sitting in a near-dark room as the sun sets. I appreciate how my Apple Watch keeps me mindful about my movement, even when it feels like the prompts are kind of passive aggressive.

However I also love driving a “dumb” vehicle because I’ve seen and heard about so many instances of computer malfunctions in cars and the idea that a computer throwing a tantrum over a software update could keep me from driving just pisses me off. Not to mention that I like being able to do simple maintenance, like changing lightbulbs and fuses, myself.

The more I thought about it, preferring knobs and buttons to a touchscreen on my van’s dashboard is my younger self not wanting to forget about that slower world I grew up in. Where we were more connected personally because there weren’t many other ways to be connected. Where things were built to be repaired and mended, not thrown out and replaced. Where the truth felt tangible and compromise seemed accessible.1

Those knobs and buttons, in a way, are a small act of resistance against a society that is becoming increasingly exhausting. We don’t need to move into a brave new world even faster, we need to restore balance in ourselves and our planet. We need to let go of the idea that resisting technological changes automatically means we’re ready for the old folks home. Not every change is for the good of us all.

Here is a breakdown of the podcast episodes that I listened to for this essay and links to most of them.

McKinsey on AI - “Getting the feels: Should AI have Empathy?”

A podcast by McKinsey & Company, a global management consulting firm. The host wasn’t directly talking to the guest, it was a recording of the guest’s responses in a previous conversation with the host narrating. It felt like an odd format to me. (Their episode website was broken so I wasn’t able to link to the show.)

This Day in AI - “Microsoft Bing Chat (Sydney), Does Chat GPT have Memories? DAN Prompt, BASE64 & AI Sentience?”

This is a relatively new podcast with only 2 episodes. It’s hosted by the co-founders at Ortto.com. Ortto is a marketing automation and analytics platform. They bring up some good points, but the tech bro vibe is heavy with this one.

The Cognitive Revolution: How AI Changes Everything - “E2: Why AI Will Cause a Cognitive Revolution with Nathan Labenz and Erik Torenberg”

Another relatively new podcast with only 3 episodes. This one wasn’t as interesting as I was hoping it would be based on the title. They spent the first half hour talking more about themselves than talking about AI, which I would’ve known about had I gone to the show description and saw the time stamp breakdown of topics before I started listening.

SuperDataScience Podcast - “A.I. Speech for the Speechless”

This was a very cool episode that described how AI is being used to read lips in patients that have been intubated and are unable to speak. It translates the lip reading into speech. Only six minutes long, part of the Five-Minute Friday series of the podcast. I wish that I had found more podcasts along these lines because I know there are positive AI developments in areas like the medical field.

The Ezra Klein Show - “A Skeptical Take on the A.I. Revolution”

Ezra is joined by guest Gary Marcus, who has become one of the leading voices of AI skepticism. He’s not anti-AI, but is deeply worried about the direction it’s headed. His article “AI’s Jurassic Park Moment” is an excellent read.

AI Literacy - “#2 Why Amazon’s Alexa is Female with Noelle Silver (Amazon, Microsoft, Women in AI)”

I was really excited to listen to this one, and was disappointed by the “girl boss” feeling it had. The first half of the show is the hosts asking questions like how the guest balances being a mom of 4 with being a professional in the tech world and how she got to be where she is now. Spoiler: the answer to the show’s title is only a few sentences buried later in the episode. There’s no in-depth discussion about it like the title would suggest. However, the guest does touch on why a lack of diversity in AI development is detrimental, which is a decent discussion.