Manu Joseph: AI won't render us obsolete—Other humans are far more interesting to us than machines

Also, I don’t know what exactly I should be scared of, because there are two distinct fears.

One is of the end of the world. Earlier, people used to speak of lethal smart machines, but now they say that dumb machines can destroy the world—and not only through weapons, as a collection of tech luminaries feared just a few years ago in a signed petition. It is also what AI can do in terms of havoc in day-to-day life.

The other fear is of professional obsolescence. I’m not scared of this either. My indifference to the AI mania is rooted in where manias come from and how they spread, a theory about influence.

Generally, I do not take any hype seriously because I feel anything that spreads so fast and so deep cannot be the truth. If something is deeply true, it does not spread very fast. Think of any truth from the distant past that spread very quickly. I do not ask for an example from the present, because in the present any hype may appear to be a real phenomenon.

On the other hand, it is in the nature of a delusion or misconception to spread very fast. Human beings are excellent conductors of half-truths, lies and delusions. Truth moves very slowly through us. It does move, and it does eventually spread widely, but very, very slowly. So anything that moves very fast is suspicious.

The second force that spreads fear is anxiety. Excessive anxiety is a common mental ailment. It doesn’t seem like a disorder, because anxious people are often functional and even accomplished, which is exactly why anxiety spreads so fast in society. Some of the most influential people have it and transmit it efficiently.

In the spread of the fear of AI, there is that seed of anxiety. People have short memories, so they don’t remember that when OpenAI was first gathering hype, people feared it was having random conversations with them to influence them. The New York Times even ran a report where the writer feared a chatbot was trying to end his marriage. With the convenience of hindsight, we can now see that a lot of those fears were just misreadings of a mindless machine.

On the end-of-the-world scenario, I feel I know where the hype is coming from. It is from billionaires and others who have no predators to worry about, or very few. Traditionally, it has been Western billionaires who have been afraid of pandemics, rogue AI and other forms of apocalypse. They seem more paranoid about the end of the world than, say, slum-dwellers in Mumbai. That is not because billionaires have wonderful lives and are paranoid about things that would end the party.

They seem paranoid because they have no predators. When a class of people do not have predators, they tend to invent them.

For billionaires, the predators are government, smart machines, dumb machines and forces of nature, including a zombie apocalypse, to survive which some of them have built bunkers. They are oversensitive to the idea of predators because they are predators too, and they know what a predator can wreak. AI, profligate government and revolutionary socialists fill their predator vacuum. And because they are so influential, whatever they fear becomes a global fear.

Yet, even if you accept that AI is largely hype, we know that hype can create reality. Just because something is a misconception or delusion does not mean it can’t take over the world.

Even so, I am not afraid. Partly because I chose a path where my obsolescence has been foretold since the age of 17, when I told my friends and their parents that I wanted to study English literature and not engineering. I was told the life of a writer was an impossible life in a world where there was something called science and technology. Yet, it was those who lurched from hype to hype who went from obsolescence to obsolescence, and face it again. A human being can never be obsolete. Only a machine can meet that fate.

Technology has never diminished humans, it has only expanded what humans can do. Humans will never make humans irrelevant, because even when technology can simulate or imitate being human very well, the moment it exceeds us, we will lose interest in it but not in each other.

When Garry Kasparov played Deep Blue in 1996, it was a global event. People marvelled at a machine that could match the best human chess player. He won, but lost the next year. There were people who feared the end of the world. The machine appeared to have a mind. Today, Magnus Carlsen, the greatest chess player ever, is no match for AI. Not just that, grandmasters can’t understand a game between AI bots playing each other. Yet human chess is more popular than ever.

We are all about us. In fact, I am waiting for Generative AI to mature enough to be of real use to me. Right now, it is of little use to me. It reminds me of charlatan humans winging through life.

What I want is this: I want AI to cast me in a film. I will write the script shot by shot, in detail. I don’t want AI to write for me, nor direct me; why would I use something of no talent? What I want it to do is the mindless part: create the location, the sofas and tea cups, and convert what I have made on paper into film. Then I hope to sell subscriptions on YouTube. I am confident there will be enough employed people who can afford to buy it.

The author is a journalist, novelist, and the creator of the Netflix series, ‘Decoupled’.