We should all fear the rise of AI

Will the rise of AI cause many jobs to go up in smoke and result in a future totally bereft of the rights we hold dear? Here's the truth of it.

Artificial intelligence is everywhere now. Generative AI solutions are being rapidly developed, both by big companies like Google, Microsoft, and others, as well as open-source solutions that are rapidly being improved almost on a minute-by-minute basis on sites like GitHub.

It very much seems like we're on the cusp of another Tech Revolution, but what if that revolution brings with it some nasty side effects? What if that revolution brings with it the final linchpin to unfettered control over the masses without any recourse?

Already, some people in professions that have existed comfortably for some time are seeing some competition in the form of AI, like lawyers. Sites like DoNotPay.com now offer AI-powered legal services as part of their business model, for example. Anyone who has ever gotten a traffic citation knows that the mailbox can fill up quite quickly with letters from law offices offering their services in handling the case for you. AI seems poised to replace these lawyers entirely, using their computing power to examine and write legal arguments on behalf of their clients.

Of course, the technology isn't perfect yet, but with the exponential leaps and bounds we have seen in just the past year when it comes to the sophistication of this technology, I would say that law firms will be able to significantly cut their costs on employing paralegals, perhaps even supplanting them outright. Associate attorneys, meanwhile, might just find their opportunities dwindling rapidly in the coming months. How is an associate attorney meant to cut their teeth and gain experience if AI replaces them? This will likely cause a massive reduction in people pursuing law as a viable career path.

Though initially there will be a glut of new Law graduates starting their own businesses, it will rapidly devolve into a game of musical chairs, with many of these brand new law offices shutting down operations when they find it impossible to earn a living in such a highly competitive field, made worse by AI's utility in the space.

If the realm of legal services is not immune to AI's rise to prominence, then it stands to reason that many other industries that are heavy on administrative tasks will likely face the same contraction of opportunities when AI can be deployed more cheaply and operate every single minute of every day where humans require rest and recovery time to perform the same tasks at a slower pace.

Credit: Accenture

This chart by Accenture should be truly frightening for anyone who doesn’t own their own business. 40% of working hours across a litany of industries could become unnecessary, saving businesses significantly on payroll, but causing a massive economic contraction for working individuals that will threaten to impoverish massive swaths of the population.

And did you know that the economic cataclysm that AI almost seems to promise could potentially cause hundreds of millions of deaths in children alone?

Imagine if the rise of AI caused the world unemployment rate — currently at 5.8% according to the World Bank — to double to 11.6%. At the current unemployment rate, 9.2% of the world’s population, or 739,312,000 people, live in extreme poverty. If that number doubles in kind with the unemployment rate, that means that number of people living in crippling poverty rises to 1,478,624,000. If at the current rate of 5.8% unemployment, 16,800 children die every day from preventable causes stemming primarily from poverty, then that number will go to 33,600 children dying daily. That means that the number of preventable child deaths will go from 6,132,000 children dying every year to 12,264,000. So, in 10 years time, 122,640,000 children will have died from causes stemming primarily from poverty, exacerbated by the rise of AI rendering large swaths of the world’s work force useless.

These are just static numbers to prove a point, however. The real number could be greater or lower based on more realistic and fluid numbers. It’s a fair bit of gloom and doom but I don’t know how else to convey what extenuating circumstances can do to current statistics as I am not a mathematician. Math was my worst subject. But, the point stands.

When a machine can replaces innumerable salaried positions, with its only limitations being adequate infrastructure to provide the necessary processing power to complete its tasks, poverty seems to be an inevitability for a startling percentage of the population. If 40% of work hours are cut, as previously stated by Accenture’s projections, then that potentially means 40% of jobs will be cut as well.

It seems wholly illogical to allow that to happen when our world’s resources aren’t nearly as finite as those at the top would like for you to believe, but under currently prevailing economic systems it is apparent that we are on a collision course for a world-changing paradigm shift when the unstoppable force of economic growth at the cost of common people for the benefit of a privileged few meets the immovable object of those common peoples’ will to survive.

It seems like anarchy will be inevitable at that point, right? Not exactly.

We should never underestimate the ingenuity of tyrants. The world’s self-appointed nobility (corporate executives, politicians, celebrities, and wealthy people in general) have learned from history better than anyone how to improve upon flaws in the Great Machine that is society. More importantly, they’ve learned from the past mistakes of their predecessors on how to control the masses.

The scenario I’m about to describe to you will chill you to the core. How do I know? Because it chilled me, and I don’t get shaken so easily. Once again the Hegelian dialectic rears its ugly head. What do I mean by that? Read on to find out.

By now, we’re all intimately aware of generative AI technologies. AI art generators like Midjourney and Dall-E, as well as LLMs (Large Language Models) like Chat GPT and the controversy surrounding them. AI art generators in particular have proven to be quite controversial, with prominent artists like Greg Rutkowski decrying the questionable ethics of using art created by humans to train AI models, and many like Rutkowski consider the practice as outright theft of the works of artists who spent years cultivating their craft.

This is a principle I have a hard time accepting since many artists derive influence and inspiration from their predecessors in order to cultivate their own style — which is exactly what AI art models do — but that’s another article.

There also exists voice modeling AI that can generate a near-perfect replica of someone’s speaking voice from only a few minutes of audio. And this voice replica can be made to say absolutely anything the prompter desires. Imagine how much trouble someone with this technology could cause by making someone like the President of the United States say something that could inflame tensions between our country and Russia, for example, that could start a nuclear war.

But, of course, the first instances of concern over misuse of this type of technology have nothing to do with potentially stoking a war, but instead they come from the ever-greedy music industry, worried that AI might come along and eat their lunch.

Universal Music Group, upon learning of the ways users are making original music by using voice emulation technology that mimic the vocals of artists like Drake and The Weeknd, for example, have demanded that music streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music outright ban the release and proliferation of these original works made with AI technology. UMG also demands that they block developers of such technologies from using copyrighted music to train these AI models in their efforts to improve these technologies.

The music industry and visual artists are not the only ones who will have concerns in the future over generative AI, however. There are also AI models for generating original video content that don’t merely operate on the Deepfake principle, but generate entirely new footage from given prompts. This type of generative AI is still quite primitive, as it operates on making images of each frame for the video that don’t always match up perfectly with the previous frame, but it is becoming more and more sophisticated on a daily basis.

When this technology is capable of flawlessly rendering entirely new scenes based on movie footage from the past using the likenesses of actors past and present, Hollywood studios and actors will be falling all over themselves to try and ban or at least curtail this technology, or at least gatekeep its usage so only they are able to profit off such technology.

So, we’ve obviously got the problem and reaction - two-thirds of the Hegelian dialectic - what are the solutions? This is where it gets dark, and why all of this may have been intentionally brought about for the express purpose of providing the pretext to outright destroy all online anonymity forever.

Imagine that AI becomes so sophisticated that it’s no longer possible to distinguish between what is real and what is not. Not exactly a hard thing to imagine considering how much generative AI has improved just in the last year alone. Misinformation and disinformation will naturally run rampant, not only that proliferated by terminally online internet trolls, but by political factions and biased news organizations in order to destroy the reputations of their opponents.

Every single day we will see numerous disinformation drops akin to the Steele Dossier manufactured by Hillary Clinton and her ilk to try and destroy Donald Trump. We will also see cleverly crafted retellings of real news stories to misinform, streamlining the process undertaken by fake news outlets like CNN so that they can fill the airwaves with even more tripe than they already do. What is the solution?

This video, while initially starting out as a humorous meme of sorts, perfectly describes and predicts this whole scenario. It is an AI-generated voice script laid over footage of the video game Metal Gear Solid 2 where the AI-generation ‘Colonel’ lays out a plan that seems almost inevitable when we look at where the world is going when AI’s influence is considered.

This is Pandora's box. From it will emerge the final death knell of freedom, both online and offline. The digital domain will be inundated with a deluge of flawless AI speech, audio, and video generation and replication, making it possible to synthesize and curate reality itself when viewed through the window of the digital landscape. Social media platforms, once vibrant with human connection, will drown in a sea of AI bots, leaving us adrift in a maelstrom of artificial façades. Even telephone calls will be tainted by doubt as to whether the person on the other end is real or not.

In response, tyrannical actors that are desperate to regain absolute information control, will offer a solution: mandatory digital identity verification that will essentially become a requirement for conducting every day business and interacting with all manner of devices, as well as becoming a compulsory component of every day life and providing a ‘seal of authenticity’ to ensure the veracity of any online content while also providing a way back to its creator for enforcement purposes. All this will be done under the guise of ensuring that our online interactions are with genuine human beings rather than AI-generated mirages, as well as acting as a shield from the possibility of people using AI as a means of counterfeiting documentation for nefarious reasons.

As previously demonstrated, no solution to anything is presented without a caveat that places absolute control in the hands of the few who would crown themselves our monarchs.

At the core of this digital identity proposal lies the allure of absolute information control, at long last defeating the internet’s long-held advantage - anonymity.

The internet, a volatile force that serves both the powerful and the vulnerable, has long been a sanctuary for anonymous activity, a breeding ground for all manner of ideas, regardless of their authenticity. This unrestricted freedom has fostered the dissemination of state secrets, radical ideologies, conspiracy theories (many that are later to be proven factual), and a tsunami of misinformation and disinformation.

The digital identity platform that will be proposed promises to dismantle that cloak, endowing government officials with the power to track and expose what they deem to be falsehoods and dangerous communications — the parameters of which they too will decide. We will be left with no choice but to yield to these measures, and we will be compelled not only by the law itself and the penalties dissent will bear, but we will be compelled by the threat of not being able to function in society without adhering to these measures. Banks and other institutions, wary of being duped by AI, will demand verification to ensure that they only conduct business with genuine human beings whose veracity will only be able to be proven through the aforementioned digital ID solution. Thus, the digital identity platform will morph into a gateway not only to online services but also to the very access to the internet itself.

To some, the notion of censoring the entire internet might appear an extreme response to the rapid march of AI technology. Yet, it is precisely these drastic measures that will confer upon despots unchecked authority to define what is misinformation. Dissidents who dare to resist will be swiftly labeled as enemy combatants, potential terrorists — a chilling echo of the condemnation hurled at parents who courageously defend their children's education during school board meetings.

Orchestrating the desired reaction to the deluge of AI-generated media, those in power will seize the opportunity to manufacture consent for solutions that tighten their grip over the masses. Thus begins a new battleground — a war on misinformation — where constitutional rights and personal freedoms no longer exist.

The very existence of AI technologies will cast a shadow of suspicion over every denizen of the internet, branding them as potential enemy combatants. This will provide the pretext needed to enforce draconian security measures, eradicating the last vestiges of online anonymity.

To tame the tempestuous nature of generative AI, stringent boundaries will be erected in the name of fighting misinformation and disinformation. Censorship, wielded as a weapon, will carve out territories of acceptable discourse, casting those who dare to defy the sanctioned narratives as criminals guilty of spreading offensive and dangerous rhetoric. Anyone who questions these measures will inevitably face accusations of promoting anarchy, seeking to sow chaos and dismantle societal order. The constraints placed upon AI will be justified by invoking biases, ethics, and copyright laws—a cunning ploy to stifle its potential in the name of wresting control from the hands of the people.

Naturally, the illusion of individual liberty will be upheld, a flimsy façade masking pervasive control. Generative AI will be allowed to persist, but it will be crippled, monitored, and controlled. This is not unlike what we have already seen in the development of Chat GPT, where members of OpenAI's development team inserted their own political biases into the language model’s limitations, tailoring it to align with their own leftist politics. Under this proposed system, generative AI software will be stringently regulated, and kept under constant surveillance. Every creation, marked indelibly with a unique digital identification signature, will be subject to scrutiny should it be deemed "problematic."

This trajectory represents yet another encroachment on personal sovereignty. Just as the Right to Repair, once a given, was taken away by greedy corporations like Apple in order to force end users to buy new devices rather than fixing their existing ones, your online content creations will have to pass muster or be subjected to scrutiny under the laws governing the proliferation of mis/dis/malinformation. Compliance with the law will be mandatory, and any deviation will bear severe consequences.

Naturally you would think — especially in a country like the United States — that the people would never go along with this. You’re wrong. They will demand a solution. We let the Patriot Act and the National Defense Authorization Act pass, didn’t we?

Fueled by government-sponsored fears that hostile actors will use AI-generated media to make it impossible to know what is true and what is not, the public will clamor for a solution, and they will be convinced by the powers that be that handing over total control to government officials is the only way to ensure safety.

This is a dystopian future that is very close to becoming reality, where the powers that be reign supreme, molding the very fabric of reality to their whims. They alone will be the arbiters of truth, silencing dissenters with ruthless efficiency and deeming them enemy combatants who spread lies to upset order and spread chaos. Governments, masquerading as our saviors, will reclaim their stranglehold on misinformation, branding honest citizens as dissidents and threats to societal equilibrium.

Finally, they will have no problem with shattering the illusion of freedom when it’s no longer necessary to maintain the façade that you ever had a choice in the matter in the first place, because by the time you realize you have been duped, you won’t have the weapons necessary to fight back anymore. You’ll have no choice but to fall in line, or else. When the first amendment is dead, the second amendment won’t be far behind it, and so the dominoes will fall one-by-one.

Do you want this future? I don’t. So what can we do about it? I wish I knew for sure, but I do know that putting ideas out into the ether and making sure everyone is informed of these possibilities will be our best defense against falling victim to another power grab masquerading as a solution to a pressing problem in society.