A few weeks ago, I took on AI (Artificial Intelligence), and I think I won. In my ‘Munson versus AI’ rumble in the migration jungle article for this very publication, I asked the rapidly developing, online information machine to give me the top 10 best things about Portugal for potential immigrants and wasn’t exactly blown away by the results.
“What it can’t, and I suspect will never be able to do, is convey the depth, warmth and intangibility of how beautiful life can be,” I concluded after assessing its efforts, adding it will “likely take care of the prose, and leave us humans to convey and revel in the poetry of life, Portugal and the delight and beauty of human experience.”
Now, whilst I maintain that philosophical and metaphysical angle on the matter, which I feel strongly about and believe will not change, the intervening weeks since first publication have had me look deeply at the more material and societal changes that are likely.
Upon further consideration of the more prosaic aspects, and by that I mean mainly YouTube viewing and a little expert consultation, I must say it would be remiss of me not to discuss the potentially devastating impact of AI further with my Good Morning Portugal! community and, by extension, with you here.
Before I go into the longer grass, some say ‘weeds’, of the AI debate, I’d like to ask YOU what your view is. If your view is something along the lines of: “Why should I worry? I am retired and enjoying my long-awaited retirement in Portugal!”, I would suggest you hear me out, and take seriously some of the most concerned experts in the field, who see the technological time that is upon us as of greater importance and impact than the arrival of the internet itself, which will likely turn out to be its Trojan Horse.
Not being concerned about its arrival and impact, if not directly in your own life footprint, but in the world that will inevitably change around you, is like Bill Gates saying in the mid-90s (allegedly) that the Web would never catch on and that, when it did, he added it “makes the world so factual.”
Clearly, he’s done OK from being an early adopter and exploiter of the online world, even if his easily-found views on it appear contradictory. Point being that understanding and flexing with something is far more important than what you feel and say about it at any random moment.
To help us understand this better, let’s look at what Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said last week, warning that artificial intelligence could “kill half of all entry-level white-collar jobs”, and soon. According to Emma W. Thorne, Editor at LinkedIn News, “In a new interview with Axios, Amodei predicts that the technology could also raise the unemployment rate as high as 20% within five years. AI companies “have a duty and an obligation to be honest about what is coming,” he says, so that they and governments can adequately prepare for the changes.
Anthropic, by the way, according to Grok (of course!), “is an AI research company founded in 2021 by former OpenAI researchers. It focuses on developing safe, interpretable, and value-aligned AI systems, with products like Claude, a conversational AI model competing with ChatGPT. Based in San Francisco, Anthropic emphasizes ethical AI development and has raised significant funding from investors like Amazon and Google.”
Therefore: important, albeit worrying, when the inventor-boss is shouting caveats rather than USPs and ‘sizzle’.
Talking of governments, ours here has very responsibly birthed a strategy called “AI Portugal 2030 (Portuguese National Initiative on Digital Skills) – an innovation and growth strategy to foster Artificial Intelligence in Portugal in the European context”, whose raison d’être is to make sure that “AI technologies should be easily available to promote the efficiency and quality of all activities, including SMEs, public services and every citizen. This requires qualifying the labour force and to guarantee that Portugal will be in the forefront of AI Education for all.”
In the foreword of the strategy document, Minister of Science, Technology and Higher Education, Manuel Heitor (since replaced), promised that “AI will improve the quality of services and the efficiency of processes while guaranteeing fairness, wellbeing, and quality of life”, all benefits we should rightly hope for from life-altering technologies, despite the leisure-promising lies of earlier tech prophets, who said computers would give us more free time. Instead, we used the computers to do more work, and the next bit might have us working more for the computers?
And that’s the big issue here, that we might all step forward to take responsibility for, rather than avoid, assuming that the creators (companies) and guardians (governments) have got it all under control, and that we shouldn’t worry our pretty little heads about it. Not until at least the implants are ready that will adorn and prettify our heads, allowing us to think directly into our devices, rather than do all this tedious typing and talking stuff.
OK, I think I might have gone a bit dark on the societal stuff, but suffice to say that a full and far-ranging conversation is required on this matter of ‘Web 4.0’ and what’s being promoted as an ‘intelligent internet’, which I am sure will appeal to any law-abiding human being who gets locked out of their online banking and separated from their own money for “security reasons” and has to suffer the routine indignity of proving they are not a robot to, guess what, a flipping robot!
Whilst I maintain that we can let the machines manage the information, and thereby free ourselves to manage transformation (of ourselves and our planetary home), this will be a process and journey that requires vigilance and resolve. We must ask ourselves questions bigger than what effects will AI have on us, like “Why are we here?” and “What are we really here for?”
With half a mind on these not inconsiderable considerations, let’s keep the other half open to the everyday changes that are barrelling their way towards us, which I will continue to research and detail here for you, over the coming weeks of this exciting month.
