What happens to culture in the age of AI

Everything around us is today either war or AI or a mix of both. So human beings are either being killed or everyone wants to replace them. Not a happy every after for humankind after a few hundred thousand years of being top dog.

How did we get here? I have been working for a little more than a couple of decades now. The goals for organizations in that time went from productivity to growth to productivity and growth through AI. Does that mean we will reach the dual goal through AI alone? Is it a hype, is it for real? I don't know, I am learning as much as everyone else around. Am sure so are the researchers, breaching frontiers they didn't know could be breached.

To what end though?

We reached a world full of conflict after all these years, tech was not supposed to be doing that, we were supposed to be happier, healthier, wealthier. None of that came through. Not for the vast majority anyway. For sure, there were some breaking news. A miniscule minority traipsed around the outer borders of Earth of the inner borders of space, the silent vast majority watched them on their preferred medium of getting information and then went about doing their business. We could diagnose and cure diseases, faster and with more surety (err ok Covid) but priced it out of bounds for the ones who needed it the most probably.

So what makes AI any different than the tech that came before it, be it figuring out fire, the steam engine, computers, internet (I may have skipped a few generations in between the first two and the last two but you get the drift).

I think, or better still, I hope, the answer to that is culture.

In a world where every output is AI generated (confession, I toyed with the idea of an AI generated image for the cover page of this article and then realized that would be counter intuitive to what I was writing, I think!), human generated content becomes precious. That was not my original line, it was some research paper I read (this one I believe, The Curse of Recursion: Training on Generated Data Makes Models Forget). So as AI generated content proliferates, so do biases, so does misinformation and so does 'sameness'. Everything feels like the one before it and for that hurdle to be crossed, you need human beings and human culture. Of course, we will not reach that stage immediately, as with everything new and shiny, we will play and hurt ourselves before we find the better path. Don't you think people burnt themselves when they first discovered fire? Think of a bowl of porridge, humans are never the congealed mass, they are the raisins or nuts or fruits that stand out in this congealed mass. After all, Sherlock Holmes or the BBC version which put Benedict Cumberbatch in the spotlight did say, you can always predict the behaviour of a crowd of people (ah I knew I would bring in advertising and marketing somehow) but pull someone out of a crowd and then that person's behaviour is unpredictable. Hence personalization in marketing is so elusive! ;)

Rambled enough for the first post, but culture will trump (no, not him) the sameness of AI and that will be what makes AI better for us.