The Artificial Versus the Real
AI can certainly help us do some stuff better, but it cannot do anything
without us having done it before, writes Taimur Tajik.
☰
Just Saying: AI, Creativity and Us
Climate change and AI will likely be the two most important topics humankind will have to address for the foreseeable future. Both are set to pose formidable challenges, particularly for today’s young and their successor generations.
With climate change, we are already out of our depth. But then, has this not always been the case? Our self-assured hubris may have led us to believe that nature’s forces are at our disposal and command – but that was never the case. Now, we have no choice but to mitigate and adapt.
With AI, we are still within our depths. It is after all a tool of our own creation. Perhaps the invention of the screwdriver could be viewed as a rudimentary form of AI? At the moment, the tangible challenges posed by AI are likely to come in the form of job losses, similar to what happened when automation and subsequently digitisation became the new normal. Supposing this is so and it remains within our control, AI, like other technological innovations, should be embraced with open arms, but with the caveat that, like every innovation, an understanding of its limits is essential.
AI as a tool is a marvellous thing.
Even prior to the arrival of ChatGPT, AI had already achieved many wonderful milestones in human advancement, especially in the health sector, and one can only hope that it continues to develop in its ability to accompany and facilitate human endeavour.
From the responses to our Talking Heads feature in this issue, Pakistan’s advertising and marketing community is set to be an enthusiastic adopter of the advantages AI brings with it. The consensus (rightly so) is that from an advertising and marketing perspective, although hugely capable of taking over and speeding up the mundane, and not-so-mundane, tasks involved in routine delivery, AI falls short in its capacity to make the human connections required to generate the full complement of positive human responses. Furthermore, functioning on a data-based predictive model, AI does not have the capacity for original thought – it can only sort through vast amounts of data and provide options based on the pre-existing data it has already been fed. At least so far.
All this is well and good. Whether we refer to advertising and marketing, medical sciences or space research, the assumption is that AI’s capacity to absorb and sift through incredible amounts of data and then generate a result is predicated on achieving positive outcomes with good consequences. Whether it is about generating copy for an advertisement, predicting weather patterns or manufacturing self-driving cars, these outcomes are, in intent, for the ‘greater good’ of human existence.
The danger, however, arises when AI’s capabilities are used to create negative outcomes with bad consequences for humanity (including but not limited to social manipulation, social surveillance and the development of autonomous weapons).
And here we can allow our imagination to run riot with multiple doomsday scenarios to keep us awake at night. But the danger is real and has been underlined by scores of tech leaders, scientists and thought leaders. Geoffrey Hinton, often referred to as the ‘godfather of AI’, won the 2024 Nobel Prize for Physics for his work on AI. Yet, he warned: “I am worried that the overall consequence of this might be systems more intelligent than us that eventually take control.” As far back as 2014, Stephen Hawking warned that although AI had the power to eradicate poverty and disease, it could equally be the harbinger of the end of human civilisation.
None of this means that AI must be shunned, even if such a thing were ever possible. Of course not. AI is set to bring a lot of good stuff to human existence with a myriad of far-reaching good consequences. But what it does mean is that we must be alert to its inherent dangers – not in and of AI itself, but because human beings unfortunately have as great a capacity to do bad things as they have to do what is good. AI in its broader applications needs to be regulated. For this to be effective, we will need governments, the tech titans, business leaders and civil society to unite in a common cause.
Sadly, we live in a world where everything is politicised and highly transactional – one just has to look at the slow pace of progress made on the climate change front. And yet both pose egregious dangers to human civilisation. One has already turned into an existential threat. Do we have it in us to put in place and enforce the controls that will prevent AI from becoming yet another existential threat? This young generation has a great deal to worry about and most of all, to do.
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Even prior to the arrival of ChatGPT, AI had already achieved many wonderful milestones in human advancement, especially in the health sector, and one can only hope that it continues to develop in its ability to accompany and facilitate human endeavour.
From the responses to our Talking Heads feature in this issue, Pakistan’s advertising and marketing community is set to be an enthusiastic adopter of the advantages AI brings with it. The consensus (rightly so) is that from an advertising and marketing perspective, although hugely capable of taking over and speeding up the mundane, and not-so-mundane, tasks involved in routine delivery, AI falls short in its capacity to make the human connections required to generate the full complement of positive human responses. Furthermore, functioning on a data-based predictive model, AI does not have the capacity for original thought – it can only sort through vast amounts of data and provide options based on the pre-existing data it has already been fed. At least so far.
All this is well and good. Whether we refer to advertising and marketing, medical sciences or space research, the assumption is that AI’s capacity to absorb and sift through incredible amounts of data and then generate a result is predicated on achieving positive outcomes with good consequences. Whether it is about generating copy for an advertisement, predicting weather patterns or manufacturing self-driving cars, these outcomes are, in intent, for the ‘greater good’ of human existence.
The danger, however, arises when AI’s capabilities are used to create negative outcomes with bad consequences for humanity (including but not limited to social manipulation, social surveillance and the development of autonomous weapons).
And here we can allow our imagination to run riot with multiple doomsday scenarios to keep us awake at night. But the danger is real and has been underlined by scores of tech leaders, scientists and thought leaders. Geoffrey Hinton, often referred to as the ‘godfather of AI’, won the 2024 Nobel Prize for Physics for his work on AI. Yet, he warned: “I am worried that the overall consequence of this might be systems more intelligent than us that eventually take control.” As far back as 2014, Stephen Hawking warned that although AI had the power to eradicate poverty and disease, it could equally be the harbinger of the end of human civilisation.
None of this means that AI must be shunned, even if such a thing were ever possible. Of course not. AI is set to bring a lot of good stuff to human existence with a myriad of far-reaching good consequences. But what it does mean is that we must be alert to its inherent dangers – not in and of AI itself, but because human beings unfortunately have as great a capacity to do bad things as they have to do what is good. AI in its broader applications needs to be regulated. For this to be effective, we will need governments, the tech titans, business leaders and civil society to unite in a common cause.
Sadly, we live in a world where everything is politicised and highly transactional – one just has to look at the slow pace of progress made on the climate change front. And yet both pose egregious dangers to human civilisation. One has already turned into an existential threat. Do we have it in us to put in place and enforce the controls that will prevent AI from becoming yet another existential threat? This young generation has a great deal to worry about and most of all, to do.
Read Comments
Related Stories
And here we can allow our imagination to run riot with multiple doomsday scenarios to keep us awake at night. But the danger is real and has been underlined by scores of tech leaders, scientists and thought leaders. Geoffrey Hinton, often referred to as the ‘godfather of AI’, won the 2024 Nobel Prize for Physics for his work on AI. Yet, he warned: “I am worried that the overall consequence of this might be systems more intelligent than us that eventually take control.” As far back as 2014, Stephen Hawking warned that although AI had the power to eradicate poverty and disease, it could equally be the harbinger of the end of human civilisation.
None of this means that AI must be shunned, even if such a thing were ever possible. Of course not. AI is set to bring a lot of good stuff to human existence with a myriad of far-reaching good consequences. But what it does mean is that we must be alert to its inherent dangers – not in and of AI itself, but because human beings unfortunately have as great a capacity to do bad things as they have to do what is good. AI in its broader applications needs to be regulated. For this to be effective, we will need governments, the tech titans, business leaders and civil society to unite in a common cause.
Sadly, we live in a world where everything is politicised and highly transactional – one just has to look at the slow pace of progress made on the climate change front. And yet both pose egregious dangers to human civilisation. One has already turned into an existential threat. Do we have it in us to put in place and enforce the controls that will prevent AI from becoming yet another existential threat? This young generation has a great deal to worry about and most of all, to do.