The AI antidote: Will the pendulum swing again?

With Artificial Intelligence (AI) advancing at runaway speed, the UN Secretary-General António Guterres cautions that “an experiment is being run on our own societies, without a plan and without consent.” He warns that AI systems are “no longer tools awaiting instruction.” They are writing code, acting online and making choices with less and less human oversight. Our institutions were built to govern machines that follow commands. They are not ready for machines that decide…We may be the last generation able to set the terms on which humanity and machines coexist,” he said. “The door is still open. It will not stay open long.”

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The United Nations employ many smart, well-educated people, and let’s hope that our leaders will take the proper steps to protect us from the possible domination by machines.

 
It is not entirely a new worry. The theatrical Sci-Fi play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) by Czech writer Karel Čapek, pondered what would happen if someone invented a man-lookalike machine replacing human workers, and was performed in 1920. He was so far ahead of his time that there was not even a term for such a thing. He and his brother Josef, a painter, morphed the Czech word for serf labour – “robota” into “robot,” used today all over the world for such equipment. Robots worked cheaper and better. Soon they became commonplace; humankind became redundant and was eliminated by the new rulers – the robots. A daunting prognosis for sure. Čapek died in 1938, not even fathoming that a more menacing machine than a dumb robot, the world’s first general-purpose electronic computer, would be introduced in 1946, and decades later, be augmented by AI.

 
Once the machines equipped with AI become capable of thinking, inventing and developing ideas, we will not need to strain our brains anymore, and on the principle that “if you do not use it, you lose it,” we will become less and less imaginative, creative and wise. Our species is succinctly called Homo Sapiens – wise and thinking. We have used our brains to improve our quality of life and develop technologies to be more productive with less effort. At the beginning, the improvements were slow to come, but just like investments that accelerate growth, the improvements in technology also keep speeding up over time.

It is not easy to list the major inventions that helped us to reach the point where we are, but we can try:

• Pre-literate civilizations built massive stone buildings thousands of years ago. Without any writing system, it is not known what other inventions were already in place.
• Domesticating animals, not just for food but for their brawn – the horsepower – and the subsequent invention of the wheel.
• Cuneiform, one of the world’s oldest writing systems by the Sumerians, the ancient peoples in Mesopotamia, around 3500 BCE. A reed stylus was pressed into wet clay to make wedge-shaped marks, preserved after they dried out. Once uncovered, archeologists were astonished by how advanced Sumerian society was.
• Circa 1440, Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press. Books would be mass-produced and sparked literacy, the Scientific Revolution, and the Renaissance
• In the late 1700s, James Watt’s steam engine supercharged the Industrial Revolution. It powered factories, trains, and ships, shrinking global distances.
• The Industrial Revolution automated physical labour by replacing human and animal muscle with machines, thus moving workers from farms and hand-crafting trades to factories, turning trained artisans into machine operators.
• In the late 19th century, electrical power lit up the world and improved communication. It fundamentally changed daily human rhythms and city design.
• In the 20th century, the Internet connected global information networks in a flash. It transformed commerce, education, and social interaction. It created the digital foundation that modern AI now relies on.
• The AI revolution automates cognitive labour by replicating thinking, analysis, and decision-making, impacting knowledge-based professions. It progresses exponentially via digital networks, allowing global deployment of software updates that rewrite job requirements almost overnight. It compresses years of professional training into automated outputs, challenging the value of high-level cognitive specialization.

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So here we are. The emergence of AI is a unique turning point because it automates thinking rather than just physical work. It will surely make our lives much easier and more comfortable, but what can we do to keep our brains sharp despite the upcoming inactivity, to still control the machines rather than them controlling us?

 
We need an antidote, something else to exercise our brains, perhaps the opposite of the machine-like efficiency: arts, crafts and/or traditions. By definition, art is the creation of a visual object or experience, a vehicle for the expression of emotions and ideas depicted aesthetically; craft applies learned manual skills, techniques, and the creation of tangible, functional items; while traditions are passed down from older to younger people in a family or society over time and provide stability. These three can play a big part in keeping our minds active.

But even art is evolving, and contemporary art is hard to grasp sometimes. There is a valid question if the arts are getting too far ahead of the masses. The first artists depicted realistically what they saw, even though they had very little training or proper tools: just a piece of ochre colored soil for painting, and wet clay for modelling. There was no doubt what the paintings were about: prey and hunters, with their primitive weapons, or figurines depicting idols.

 
We may think that the golden era of visual arts started with Leonardo and Michelangelo in the 15th and 16th centuries; continued with Velázquez and Rembrandt in the 17th and ended with the Impressionists Monet, van Gogh, Matisse and Picasso in the 19th and 20th Centuries. But in our never-ending quest for the “new and improved,” the artists look for different ways of expressing themselves. Craft, on the other hand, is more about skills, and the traditions are the exact opposite of experimentation, so they provide some stability.

Being unique at any cost may lead to bizarre outcomes. For the artists, no guardrails are limiting their imagination. After Impressionism and Expressionism came Cubism. It was the first time paintings became difficult to comprehend. A ditty from the mid-1950s poked fun at modernism:

An artist painted a girl one time,
but his model was a restless creature.
While he dreamed about her magnificence,
she kept turning, so he painted her “a face,”
he painted her from the profile,
he painted her from the rear,
until she was depicted from all sides,
making the first Cubist picture.

It got worse when abstraction and minimalism came. The art became elitist, and even the artists themselves depended on art critics to explain what the works were about:

• Mark Rothko’s abstract pieces are not mere decorations of colour rectangles, but vessels for deep, universal human emotions like tragedy, ecstasy, and doom.
• Andy Warhol said he did not think about making art, just get it done. Let the critics decide if it’s good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art.
• By the early 1960s, Minimalism emerged as an “abstract art movement, which rejected the idea of relational and subjective painting, the complexity of Abstract Expressionist surfaces, and the emotional zeitgeist and polemics present in the arena of Action painting.”

 
If the skill is used commonly or practically, people will consider it a craft instead of art, although some artists allow the materials to keep their imagination in check. That makes crafts more palatable and may be a better antidote to the AI revolution.

 
When extremism or orthodoxy can be avoided, tradition and ancient religions could be the course to follow to get a break from the overly modernized technological world. It is a mess. The ever-so-efficient modern technology led by AI can so easily become toxic, while trying to find solace in delving deeply into arts, crafts and traditions has its pitfalls also. We are back to the beginning statement that if AI systems no longer follow our instructions, write code, and impudently make choices with less and less human oversight, we must make sure it does not get out of hand.
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While having lunch at the Austrian Canadian Cultural Centre’s restaurant in Calgary N.E., Elsa got a powerful craving for genuine European schnitzels. At their ages, Bruno and Elsa do not even buy green bananas. In the next two hours, with the help of a travel agent, they bought tickets for a direct flight to Frankfurt am Main in Germany, reserved a car, and purchased travel health insurance. On their home computer, with Google aided by AI, Bruno made hotel reservations – three in Germany, three in the Czech Republic- bought tickets for an opera and arranged for a stay with a relative in Switzerland. Total preparation time: five hours.

 
They left six days after deciding to go. Perhaps that could not be done so expeditiously in the era of travelling with horses and buggies.