A Brave (?) New World of AI
Huxley’s vision of the future world
About 100 years ago, Aldous Huxley drew an almost eerily accurate picture of the 26th-century dystopian world in his novel Brave New World. Granted he wrote about a time which is still a few centuries away, but his ideas about what may befall human society when it achieves technological supremacy are already showing strong signs of fruition.
The brave new world is full of abundance, and people live a life devoid of wants, unshackled from the dogmas and stigmas of the old world. No one is hungry, unhoused, or untreated. No woman bears a child—artificial wombs do the job—and so they are free to be what they can and want to be. Children do not have parents. They come from random eggs and sperms coming from their relevant castes (Yes, they have castes. More on this later.), and they are raised by the authority in an ideal environment. There is no sorrow. And there is Soma, a miracle medicine, to deal with any kind of mental turbulence.
It is a utopia. But only on the surface. He talks about a totalitarian regime comprising godlike supreme leaders, who turn humans into biological robots, conditioned and indoctrinated during their fetal development stage in the mechanical wombs. When these already conditioned babies are born, they fall into neatly segregated castes with defined functions, just like the one we have in South Asia. Some are privileged, taking up leadership, creative, and intellectual roles, living in the poshest neighbourhoods, and enjoying the finest things the world has to offer. Some toil in dark factories all their lives, doing the same repetitive tasks, coming back to their matchbox homes to eat the same artificial food, and living their same boring lives on the crumbs that fall through the cracks of the upper echelons.
But it is the ideas that are sowed into the heads of the citizens of the brave new world that would send a chill down your spine. Because the ideas of the supreme leaders are planted in their brains before birth through conditioning, they wholeheartedly believe in what they are ‘supposed to’ believe and do what they are destined to do. That’s why nobody questions the utterly unequal caste system that requires too many people, generation after generation, to live sub-human lives. Even the lowest caste people sincerely believe that they should rot. Mothering or fathering children is repugnant, and everyone cringes at the thought of natural childbirth or parenting. Anything from the old world is banned—art, culture, religions, and ideas. Only some specific forms of knowledge-seeking, art, and thinking are allowed. Everything else is blasphemy. Few who think differently are silenced.
It is as if the supreme leaders conduct a complicated puppet show to materialize their vision of the brave new world.
Many of Huxley’s predictions are sounding increasingly plausible, like artificial food, artificial womb, and Soma. But I will focus on how the information revolution is already seizing our thoughts, beliefs, attitudes, and actions—in other words, our lives, and how artificial intelligence, more specifically platforms based on large language models, for example, ChatGPT, threatens to take human society dangerously closer to the brave new world.
Our amazing, vulnerable brain
Our brain has neurons, transferring and processing sensory information, making us human, and each one of us has about 100 billion neurons, roughly equal to the number of stars in the Milky Way. Our brain has miraculous capacities to seek the truth, rationalize, empathize, and best of all, to create. Yet, the same brain is capable of unfathomable thoughtlessness, stupidity, and cruelty.
The vulnerabilities of the human mind are many, often rather primal, and thus very strong. I will discuss a couple that are most relevant to this article.
First, our mind uses a lot of heuristics—mental shortcuts in plain language. There are many types of heuristics. I present just a couple of examples. We determine the likelihood of something happening based on the example that comes easily to our mind (like plane crashes are frequent, but really?). We use stereotypes based on hearsay or limited experience to judge others (like illegal immigrants are criminals, but what percentage?). Authority figures are another source of heuristics, believing in the words of gods, prophets, or scientists to be true without question, for example. But heuristics have emerged in our evolutionary process for a solid reason. It helps us to find patterns in the billions of signals from visual, auditory, and olfactory senses to generalize and make decisions. Without heuristics, it would be impossible for us to live a normal life, and we would be stuck in a perpetual state of analyzing anything new we encounter.
In fact, using heuristics is so essential for survival that our brain is wired to use it instead of analyzing and researching the unknown, which is always extra work for the brain (and by extension, good exercise, and exercise is hard, everyone knows). So, we are quick to use heuristics in cases where they should not be applied, especially when such an application is consistent with our existing worldview. For example, if a conservative person happens to meet only a handful of arrogant liberals, she is quite likely to conclude that all liberals are arrogant. To save her from the consternation of confronting good liberals (In her mind, liberal ideology is evil, and thus people believing in it must be evil. Thus, the contradiction of meeting good liberals causes real pain in her brain) her conservative brain will not register their goodness. It can also be the other way around.
That brings me to the second point. We humans are overly attached to the ideas that we have already formed, especially if they are fundamental to our belief system, and we go to extreme lengths to prove to ourselves (and others) the validity of those ideas. For example, Amish people in the USA are ordained not to use any kind of human technology. So, they play an astonishing mental gymnastic to define technology. For example, many Amish are now producing their own electric power using solar panels instead of getting it from the grid, as if doing so rinses technology out of the contraption. Now, we may think that’s stupid. But we have no clue how many implausible ideas we are holding onto with fervour at this very moment, believing them to be perfectly rational and true.
We may be the smartest animal on earth, but our animal brain is designed to not work hard and to avoid the pain of conflicting thoughts. That’s why we are extremely prone to get into the rabbit hole of information or ideas that support our worldview. And our brain ignores those that are against our worldview or deems those untrue, stupid, or conspiratorial. This is particularly true for our religious and political ideologies. Because they are so fundamental to who we are, we are usually desperate to prove that we are right.
What unfettered information does to the vulnerable human mind?
For the last decade or so, we have been watching how the new media—Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and the like—is changing the DNA of human society, how we interact with our friends and family, what we consume, and what image we project to the world. Of course, it has opened boundless opportunities to learn, grow, connect, and express creativity unshackled from the gatekeepers like TV, newspaper, and production houses.
But what’s probably less direct yet most unsettling is how it is shaping our minds—our ideas, beliefs, and drives. Social media has become the perfect platform to feed our deep-seated vulnerabilities, especially those I just discussed. It allows anyone to share anything they want, be it true or false, beneficial or outright evil. Social media is designed to feed us the content that we are likely to feel good about. It means feeding us content that supports our worldview, not showing contradictory content, and worse yet, showing content—true or false—that invalidate or vilify ideas and people that we do not endorse.
It is a dangerous and potent recipe to draw people deeper into their own bubbles of ideas and drive them increasingly further away from the contradictory ones and the people believing in them. Unfortunately, there is no shortage of people and institutions that are quick to capitalize on this trait—corporates trying to sell harmful products as status symbols, politicians trying to be the next president by promising a prosperous future, and religious leaders securing dominance by selling tickets to heaven.
Social media, thus, may have significantly contributed to the rise of religious extremism and political and ideological polarization around the world of our time. The beneficiaries of these phenomena engineer and spread content to achieve their goals. And our heuristic-using and pain-avoiding lazy brain indulge in those contents.
Why I am so afraid of AI, more specifically, ChatGPT and the like—how it is poised to take us closer to the brave new world?
For ages, science fiction writers, and consequently their readers, have been fixated on AI overtaking the human race. The fear is overblown and unlikely to materialize. But the real danger is in its capacity to corrupt our minds, ushering in a possible unravelling of many monuments of our collective endeavour.
Introduced only a few months ago, ChatGPT and its different variants have dumbfounded their users with their capabilities—an impossible superhuman who knows and can do it all in an instant (these programs were fed the entire internet). You can talk to and demand any number of things from it—answers to questions, knowledgeable writing on any topic, masterpiece paintings, music, or animations based on your ideas, and so on. It’s going to do it with complete knowledge and mastery. There are still some issues with it, for example, veracity is not its best suit, and you must check the facts it produces.
But its uncanny ability to mimic human thinking, communication, and creativity is something that makes it so dangerous. If social media has opened the floodgate for spreading misinformation, propaganda, and all types of harmful content, ChatGPT has created the factory for mass-producing them at a breakneck speed, with far superior and believable quality. These programs can help you write extremely convincing articles, speeches, Facebook posts, and tweets in support of your ideas, no matter how harmful or stupid they are. They can create and manipulate photos and videos so perfectly that even experts can be fooled. So, no wonder that they will be used for creating content for spreading harmful ideas. Given the human quality of these AI-generated contents, these ideas would be far more believable and acceptable to our vulnerable human mind.
Add to this, the ever-expanding reach of the powerful corporates and politicians inside our brains through tracking our digital footprint. The internet knows us much better and deeper than we do because of our activities online. The information can be used to create and communicate customized content to manipulate and shape our minds far more ruthlessly.
The final blow of AI could be on our cognitive and intellectual development, the foundation of human civilization. Our brain is like an uncut diamond, it only shines when cut and polished. In other words, only when we gather knowledge and learn skills like writing, arguing, and critical thinking, do we develop cognitively and intellectually, something that distinguishes us from other animals. But again, this development process involves patience and hard work. And remember, our brain hates hard work. So, when AI is standing by to write our next essay or difficult email, our brain makes it hard for us to avoid that temptation. Writing has been the foremost mechanism of our cognitive and intellectual development, apart from its traditional communication role. In his recent article, Steven Pinker lamented that essay writing is going to be abolished from college education; he is worried that this will inhibit students' critical thinking skills. So, these new AI platforms pose a real danger to making our brains lazy and ineffectual.
If corporates, politicians, religious leaders, and all sorts of powerful ideologues and evil minds start harnessing the power of AI and access to personal information to target the vulnerable human mind, which may become weaker because of AI itself, it is not hard to imagine that they would capture our soul and shape our minds to their liking. And that’s what scares me the most, our own brave new world.
Now, of course, it is not all dark and scary about these new AI platforms. Just like the internet, it offers enormous potential for making the world a better place. But we must be aware of its dangers and continuously train our minds not to fall prey.
While writing this article, I consulted ChatGPT on several things, finding synonyms, examples, and definitions. But I have avoided the temptation of asking it to write it for me. I’m not sure for how long I can avoid it.