“We’ve only had a couple of years in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic to come to terms with what AI can do for us (or to us). In the cacophony of new apps now sprouting by the hour, three 2040 scenarios might immediately come to mind about the future of this technology.
“In Scenario One, advanced AI winds up simply being a bunch of tools that will massively improve our productivity, entertainment and healthcare. In Scenario Two, the use of this new tech is too pricey and inaccessible for individuals and thus restricted to secretive research at remote facilities under the auspices of governments and a handful of private players. And in Scenario Three we reckless brats have opened an AI Pandora’s box; it blows up in our faces and we die out.
“None of these scenarios will prove accurate. AI will most likely have a similar effect on our personal lives and our societies to how internal combustion engines have transformed our world over the last century and a half. Sure, there will be a few inventive individuals and teams who will fiddle with all the possible options and ideas for a while. However, it’s mindbogglingly expensive for AI to answer our (mostly lame) prompts. Just as large, cost-conscious car factories – Ford, GM, Citroën, Morris, Opel – gobbled up or wiped out tiny, tinkering car manufacturers in the early 20th century, in the same vein, the owners of large data-processing facilities – i.e. key cloud providers – will eventually choke off other AI developers in the first half of this century. Who hoards the servers and the data that AI uses as fuel? Mostly it is Microsoft, Google and Amazon. Rinse and repeat for China (Baidu, Tencent and Alibaba). No one of note in Europe. Yandex in Russia.
We will develop rules and tools to control and contain AI. And we will also put up with this tech’s bad sides – e.g., job destruction, bias and hallucinations, to name a few – just as we collectively tolerate pollution, noise, roadkill and horrible harm from driving accidents. … Driven by human profit-seeking, AI will keep encroaching upon what used to be jobs for highly trained humans. While more and more of us struggle to earn a living, synthetic abilities will invade even our homes. … Hearing a real human voice in real-time could become a privilege fairly soon. … We will increasingly seek solitude and a reprieve from that obnoxious saturation of just-in-time information. Ironically, we might seek to escape into virtual worlds powered by AI.
“What would trigger the AI industry’s tectonic transformation is a larger arms race. Mark Isambard Brunel patented and introduced stationary assembly-line machines in England, in 1802, during the Napoleonic Wars. In the U.S. in 1821, Thomas Blanchard pioneered the assembly-line style of mass production at an armory in Massachusetts. Server capacity and big data echo rubber, chromium and steel of yore. These were strictly rationed when, as of early 1942, U.S. auto manufacturers became government contractors and quickly converted their capacity to generate enough supply for the war effort.
“In case we soon opt to convert our cultural and political differences and our trade and financial rivalries into a full-blown world war, we can expect 90% of all AI capacity to be requisitioned by governments, which would have them crank up their output to an unprecedented level. If we survive that test as a species, all that capacity would then be converted back to civilian use. Only then could we expect to see mass market AI apps that might transform our productivity the way that personal four-wheel vehicles transformed our mobility, at scale, after WWII. Only when the production of bombers and tank engines was no longer required at vast numbers of existing facilities could sedans and camper vans take their places in auto plants. And become affordable at last.
“Just as we learned to regulate the resulting motorized mayhem on our roads with speed limits, seatbelts and anti-lock brakes, we will develop rules and tools to control and contain AI. And we will also put up with this tech’s bad sides – e.g., job destruction, bias and hallucinations, to name a few – just as we collectively tolerate pollution, noise, roadkill and horrible harm from driving accidents.
“What we will see as a boon to us in the future is AI-driven, incredible productivity tools. Alas, they will not do much to reduce inequality or restore fairness in our societies. We port those flaws into the digital. A definite shift to digitized living is underway. The more our two worlds coexist, the more we will struggle to negotiate the strained relationship from day to day. Moreover, the neat, digitized layer of our lives will be in stark contrast with our increasingly more volatile real-world experiences. Freaky weather, mass emergency-driven migration, financial volatility, pandemics, cyber warfare – the disruptions in our analog lives are becoming more frequent, more severe.
We won’t need any grandiose artificial general intelligence to defeat us. A daily swarm of brainless Artificial Specific Intelligences will suffice. As for AGI, I doubt that thing is likely at all. We will surely develop many specialized replicas of it, a plethora of digital parrots on steroids that will regurgitate back to us everything they know, only tweaked a bit with many filters and flavours. … What all of these tools don’t have – and where the biological common sense really resides – is emotions, in particular the hormones permeating everything that underlies our conscious selves.
“Driven by human profit-seeking, AI will keep encroaching upon what used to be jobs for highly trained humans. While more and more of us struggle to earn a living, synthetic abilities will invade even our homes. We are already getting used to interacting with digital humans in entertainment and at work. The novelty of encountering them in ads, videos and news services is quickly fading. Our fridges, heaters and vehicles may chat us up ad nauseam, serving us the latest news flash and weather alerts, sports results or stock data, cleaning tips and pop star gossip, mixed with quotes, ads and memes – and our up-to-the minute shopping list. Hearing a real human voice in real-time could become a privilege fairly soon.
“Even if we opt out of such services, others around us will expose us to the Synths. Our teens will listen to a personal tutor; our senior parents will cajole their companions; our puppies will be house-trained by digital devices. We will increasingly seek solitude and a reprieve from that obnoxious saturation of just-in-time information. Ironically, we might seek to escape into virtual worlds powered by AI. Our sleep, intuition and creation will suffer, as we will struggle to drown out the echo of that constant information assault. Trying to remember where we learnt something will be exhausting, thus tools will be made to record all our impressions, resulting in more data about data and about us. There will be little relief from all the automated agents deployed to inform us, amuse us and keep us alert.
“We won’t need any grandiose artificial general intelligence to defeat us. A daily swarm of brainless Artificial Specific Intelligences will suffice. As for AGI, I doubt that thing is likely at all. We will surely develop many specialized replicas of it, a plethora of digital parrots on steroids that will regurgitate back to us everything they know, only tweaked a bit with many filters and flavours.
“What all of these tools don’t have – and where the biological common sense really resides – is emotions, in particular the hormones permeating everything that underlies our conscious selves.
“AI is not another species. It lacks the kind of instincts and sensations embedded in every living creature. But, just in case it does prove to be a new, advanced form of autonomous intelligence, let the record show I always said we should substitute the word ‘Enter’ our keyboards with ‘Please.’”
This essay was written in November 2023 in reply to the question: Considering likely changes due to the proliferation of AI in individuals’ lives and in social, economic and political systems, how will life have changed by 2040? This and more than 150 additional essay responses are included in the report “The Impact of Artificial Intelligence by 2040”