“You can acquire any tongue in about 6 months, but in order to properly utilize it and contemplate what you’re going to utter before you say it, even 100 years of training can’t help.” - my thoughts on the utilisation of AI.
Back in 1949, one of the most prominent writers in English Literature George Orwell published his seminal work, “ 1984”, which was a political satire and cautionary tale depicting a dystopian society where all the continents and countries would come under a centralised economy and the dictatorship of a mysterious private symbolic ruler by the name of “ Big Brother”. Big Brother would infiltrate every domain of an individual’s private and social life, and any recording of any kind by an individual, be it personal or social, with an instrument would be considered a heinous crime.
Orwell’s writing in retrospect seems like a petrifying prediction of the future because of the way transition and transmission of information have drastically altered through various media across the 20th century to the 21st century and continuing. It started with the publication industry, then the electrical and telecommunications industry, and then the digital era, which commenced in the 90s and 2000s and has been in stages of drastic innovation since the 2010s. When the TV was regarded as “the idiot box” kids would shrug it off and not pay heed to what the elders were trying to say because they were so enraptured by the content the instrument was offering only years later when it’s, “almost”, incompetent alternative came into existence, social media.
Predictions about AI were also being made in the 20th century, envisioning a world where an artificial intelligence system so powerful would emerge that it would render human beings useless in nearly all domains. Works of sci-fi author Arthur C. Clarke predicted the interconnected system and telecommunications devices that would appear in the future, which would entirely alter how we perceive information.
The origin of social media could be claimed to be a controversial one, and in the modern world, all fingers would point towards “the big blue”, “ Facebook”, and for apparently all the right reasons. Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of the website, came up with the concept of the website when he hacked the student list of his university, Harvard, while sitting in his dormitory room and created a temporary website by putting in the pictures of female students to compare their appearance. He soon realised the social behaviour behind this phenomenon and realized that people were interested in what their peers or family members were up to in their lives, and that’s when he and his friends founded their idea behind the website and the company, which we now know today as Facebook.
But Orwell’s words weren’t going to lose their integrity anytime soon, and they did seep inevitably into the modern research based on the ethical disaster that the social media companies and AI would bring. Soon after the emergence of Facebook, several other social platforms emerged, each with their own USP within the social media industry, such as YouTube for video sharing, Quora for knowledge sharing and question and answers, and WhatsApp for instant text messaging. While revolutionary in their approaches and certainly impactful on human societies, there is a high price that human behaviour, intellect, and ethics have to pay for the consumption of these artificial systems.
Not too long ago, posting any sensitive data on social media across the world was regarded as a risky move, and if any type of private content was leaked, it would result in severe consequences such as cyberbullying and suicide. But shortly after, making private data public became just a means to a means for many entertainers on social media to attract eyeballs and the inevitable marketing and flow of revenue with the aid of advertisers. Putting your private life, especially your family life, comprising you and your kids, could have detrimental effects on your children. When the parents are occupied with their professions for the most part, and the kids are spending only six hours at school and most of the time in front of their screens even while having lunch, not having any restriction on the content that they’re viewing and simultaneously not knowing how to process the information that they are viewing using critical thinking then they’re bound to head towards disaster related to psychological and social well-being.
Not only kids but also adults viewing content related to others people’s lives and there isn’t any private or government body regulating the content that must appear on social or at least serves the basis for an ethical content permissible for family or individual viewing then the constant doom scrolling might lead us to our inevitable doom.
This is where the rise of critical thinking and research into the rise of AI and private content also becomes integral from several aspects. We could look at this from a simple scenario, the UPSC examinations. Millions of aspirants appear for this examination, hoping to crack the exam and gain any of the cadres of the civil services of our country. Now a naïve, fresh out of college graduate might be misled into believing by the social media companies who have either been paid by the UPSC coaching centres for PR and marketing or either the AI system who have been fed data by humans and doesn’t know how to process information and can provide unbiased data regarding the exam but not the truth such as how the exam is a preview for the stress that one will find on the job, or how there myriads of corruption cases tailing IAS and IPS officers, or how one will rarely have the freedom to do what he or she wants and the services are mostly meant to cater the unfair demands of politicians.
This also brings us to the question of mob justice on social media. Whenever we hear that any sort of offense has taken place in the country, a mob assimilates onto social media platforms to declare the “ accused” as guilty, and this tangent curve between law and social behaviour has always existed for centuries in various aspects apart from mob justice. When Abraham Lincoln abolished slavery, he knew he could get rid of slavery and not racism, and so it took years for the Black population in the USA to gain a place in serval domains such as The Feminist Movement of the 20th century where only the rights of white women were considered and not black women.
This is where a cadre of UPSC, IIS, aka Indian Information Services, and laws about cybercrimes also become crucial in our perception of democratic powers and the society around us, with the rising tide of AI. How the government is going to hand us the correct information at this point in time, where there is virtually limitless information online regarding any content, and very difficult to choose the correct sources from, is the question of the hour? In dire times such as covid-19, the stock market crashed and the global economy took a dip, and if God forbid another pandemic were to enter our lives which would destroy our lives, will the government provide us with factual information about the economy and healthcare or the manipulation using AI would be sufficient to convince us mentally? What also becomes crucial is how the constitution is going to be paired with the usage of AI, specifically in the domains of cybercrime, criticism, and freedom of speech. Will the honest IIS officers give us the accurate information, or will they just be mere puppets or pawns being controlled by the hands of crooked politicians?
This is also crucial pertaining to voicing ones opinion and criticism on social media as the quotes, sentences or statements of an individual can be taken out of context by AI without using any emotions or judgement to discern what the statement was saying as well as infiltration into the private chats by the government and to use them for private data for AI or social media companies or to put them on public display disregarding an individual’s rights to liberty, privacy and freedom of speech.
Not just Indians but also people globally have fallen into the trap of bank scam related calls where the scammers have siphoned millions out an individual’s bank just because they had their banking details and access to a phone which makes the concern for AI even scarier because of the evolution of scamming techniques and how with little to no control on AI or the corrupt use of AI that makes it detrimental to a smooth legal system?