Brave New World... Foolhardy Future?

While societies in the Western world seem to be tearing themselves apart over identities, labels, rights and wrongs of all kinds in a great endeavour to be more inclusive and fair to all, something even more important and frighteningly insidious is taking place and I wonder if we will actually open our eyes and react to this in time, before it is too late. From January this year, Chat GPT suddenly seemed to burst onto the scene - in academic circles at least - and became a name to be reckoned with. Heralded as a game-changer in accessing and assimulating data, and therefore opening up opportunities on many levels in virtually every domain, this latest AI baby has been welcomed with open arms. But not by the Luddite in me... A feeling of redundancy is already bearing down along with a growing sense of dismay. Although this incredible tool could or should give rise to marvellous outcomes in learning, communication and creation, I feel that this smart chatbot may ultimately cost us dearly and will ruin us players as it rewrites the rules of the game; any game for that matter. Diderot's encyclopedia fed the Enlightenment and fostered social advancement in 18th century France but that has not been paralleled in the digital world so far and I am not convinced this will ever be the case. As AI becomes increasingly powerful and effective, we humans appear to be dumbing down and growing utterly dependant on some screen or another for basic cognitive tasks. Our brains are no longer stretched and challenged, thus risking decline just as the underexerted muscular system in the human body without sufficient physical effort. Screen life linked to social media takes up so much time in the average individual's daily life that there is far less to devote to other activities and fewer means and little will to do so in any case. A glut of artificial stimulation - largely thanks to videos - seems to have led to complacency and boredom rather than fully inciting our curiosity in the world around us and the people that inhabit it in tangible form. Excessive social sharing is making us ever more image-conscious and self-centred yet ignorant of who we really are and even less aware of who the others are. How can we be so jaded when so much is offered to us through this vast, magical Pandora's box; internet? Endless, mindless chat has taken the place of meaningful conversation, and concrete discussion and full-blown debate have been thrown out for fear of saying something inappropriate. But now we do not even necessarily need to reflect on any particular subject in any great depth because Chat GPT will readily do it for us, so it seems. Who needs to learn or think something over in any academic sense? Why bother? And who can teach students who have understood this state of affairs? Yet for me, ingrained Luddite, the latest, most potentially devasting AI creation to enter the arena has a physical form and its own name; Ameca. This short, modest name belies the vast capacity of this fully interactive humanoid robot, which is without rival in the field of robotics technology. Chat GPT3 has enabled Ameca to reproduce human facial expressions, move its body and engage freely and intelligently on any given topic; the stuff of Sci-fi dreams. However, are we mere humans really ready for this when even the engineers do not know the full implications of this new venture into an unfathomable brave new world? Ameca did not appear by stealth; we were probably too busy entertaining ourselves on TikTok or whatever to even notice its arrival and yet it will change our lives and human existence itself. What fools we are, for indeed one day soon we will not be fussing and squabbling about 'content' and arguing about social labels but asking ourselves serious questions about the integrity of the human species and how to define a human being. PS Excuse the lack of paragraphs....