The Future of Intelligence
Technological advancements have skyrocketed in recent years, with companies exponentially investing in newer, faster, state-of-the-art ways to increase productivity and profit. The most notable of these examples is Google and Bing adding AI to their search engines. The goal is to allow a swifter access to answers—the AI program is supposed to use information from multiple sources of human publication to craft a cohesive answer to any question and/or problem. This concept brings up a great number of questions regarding what this exactly means for our future.
One concern is the implications of making the spread of information more efficient. With the current state of internet search engines, one must be careful in considering which sources to use and which to not when trying to find answers to their many questions about the world and their lives. There are multiple steps to take in these searches: crafting a question that will provide links, scrolling through and finding one or some best fit, and using their findings to answer their burning questions. With this recent program in the works comes an entirely new set of steps: craft a question and find the answer. There are very little differences between the two processes; however, those differences mean such a great convenience for searchers.
Convenience has almost always arisen the implication of progress. The calculator being invented made complex calculations easier and more convenient, which allowed massive leaps in progress in the world of mathematics. It put aside simple arithmetic to make way for something greater. With this in mind, what does the addition of artificial intelligence to search engines (which were already made for convenience) mean for the world now? What will it allow progress for? What will Artificial Intelligence’s role be? While it could pave the way for something greater, it could mean something else.
Human beings have always made everything convenient for themselves as time has gone on: transportation with cars, trains, planes, and ships; eating with fast food restaurants, processed foods, microwaves; entertainment with film, video games, and social media. Have each and every one of these conveniences brought progress to our society? One must beg the question if taking away life’s difficulties - trivial or great - takes away life’s meaning. This is not an unfamilliar question to the masses, often asked in film and TV, like Pixar film Wall-E. There will become very little room for learning when all questions are answered with such ease. This inclusion of Artificial Intelligence may lead to the further coddling of the human mind. If this is considered progress, it is a progression to the domestication of humankind.
Both are very real possibilities: a leg-up to more advancements or the slow dying of a star that is individual intelligence. To get closer to an answer to this mystery, we already have other examples of artificial intelligence in our lives, given to us for our convenience: ChatGPT. ChatGPT is a program that will write anything, given a prompt. In an environment where this technology is being implemented at an increasingly fast rate, we can make very poignant observations as to what it is doing to our education and learning. ChatGPT is being used to complete assignments in schools, all across the country. If you sit down to observe what this program has written, you could probably figure out whether or not it is of a human, but if you are unaware of the possibility that it could be of something entirely inhuman, the work that it spits out is indistinguishable, uncanny. Using this program to complete school assignments prevents kids from using their creative skills and logical reasoning. Any enrichment that a student might get from completing an activity in school is completely stripped by using ChatGPT.
This same philosophy can be applied to the application to search engines. By removing all additional steps to searching, you remove any enrichment of the search. This new era of technology brings a huge amount of change to how we think, how things work, and what it means to be a human in our society. Regardless of what it will all turn out to be, we must start thinking and considering the repercussions of this shift to artificial intelligence.
By Chloé Ghazal