Seeing beyond the lens of Platonic Embodiment

Excerpt

As we grapple with the dilemmas caused by ChatGPT and LLMs, we may ask: if AI has the huge potential of benefits to society, ranging from agriculture, medicine, health care, education and learning, workplace innovation, and poverty elimination, then why are we now facing a cultural crisis of embedding AI in societies? Is this crisis merely a lack of global regulations, inadequacy of normative ethics, or does it stem from a crisis of the high tech culture that is, ‘mesmerised by the technical challenges of building a technology that they believe might be an existential threat to humanity, while at the same time calling for governments to regulate it’ (Naughton 2023); or do the roots of this cultural crisis lie in the Silicon Valley Culture of virtual worlds, in which individuals can submerge themselves into invisible beings and escape from their realities. As we reflect on the debate on embedding artificial intelligence (AI) in society, we encounter concerns such as those of alignment of human values to the machine, building of the ethical machine, and techno-optimism enshrined in the idea of digital democracy and digital governance in the midst of data-driven virus of media platforms, and the futurist world of ‘brain transparency’. The recent pandemonium caused by LLMs and ChatGPT illustrates how even those opinion makers, who were ‘bewitched from conversations with “chatbots” (“stochastic parrots”)’, are getting concerned about how to regulate the creation of ‘disinformation that is indistinguishable from reality’, and further how to cope with a futurist scenario where, ‘AI could become sentient and start pursuing goals for which it has not been programmed’. It is perhaps too late to lament that only if we had not been blinded by the industrial mantra of economic competitiveness, and the big tech had not been allowed to race so far ahead of regulations, we could have been alert to the impact of social media platforms to polarize society and destabilize the democratic process. Perhaps, we could have also been alert to the impact of Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or TikTok on teenage mental health. John Naughton (ibid) keeps reminding us to be alert to both the potential and limits of embedding AI in society. Even now if the media and opinion makers become alert to Weizenbaum’s (1976) warning of the illusion of the magical power of the machine, we would not be mesmerized by Faustian bargain with generative AI where both sides get something: the devil gets the human soul; humans get the services that delight us. Naughton (ibid.) says that ‘The persistent rebadging of LLMs as “AI” doesn’t help, either. These machines are certainly artificial, but to regard them as “intelligent” seems to me to require a pretty impoverished conception of intelligence.’ Had we not been allured by the magical power of the machine, we wonder whether we could have anticipated how life online would change our sense of self, blurring the line between private life and public content. It is perhaps not too late to grasp the limits of techno-optimism of embedding AI in society, and how algorithms drive social media consumption and shape what we read or hear, and consequently how we think or feel. …