Summary
This essay delves deep into how Artificial Intelligence (AI) is reshaping our identities and societies. It discusses how algorithms and data sets are influencing who we are and how we interact with the world, blurring the boundaries between human thought and technological influence. It examines the introduction of technologies like Neuralink's "N1 implant," raising questions about the future of humanity in a world where humans and machines merge. It stresses the importance of approaching AI integration cautiously, with transparency and responsible innovation, to navigate the challenges of this new era while preserving the essence of human identity amidst technological advancements.
ESSAY- LOOMING IMPACT OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Changing Identities:
How A.I. visioned future is imposing cyborg symbiosis
Figure 1: (illustration by Xinmei Liu for Vox) Samuel, S. (2023). Elon Musk wants to merge humans with AI. How many brains will be damaged along the way?, from https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23899981/elon-musk-ai-neuralink-brain-computer-interface.
Who can imagine how much our self-identities change as we become more defined by algorithms and data sets controlling social media and our perception of the world? Today we live in a world where our self-identities and social roles often conflict; cybernetics like smartphones and computers extending ourselves through the internet and social media fragmenting our human ideologies than ever before. According to Science, Technology and Society (Bauchspies et al., 2008) the authors discuss, Donna Haraway (1991) in her “Cyborg Manifesto” argued that we are already “cyborgs”– cybernetic organisms that integrate mechanical artifacts and biological human action into our identities and human societies. Whether one wears glasses or contact lenses, uses a prosthetic or a wheelchair, or experiences a tool or a car as an extension of the self, people are everywhere manifesting the concept of the contemporary cyborg (Haraway, 1991). Now the integration of AI in our lives is staggeringly growing, from algorithms to potential brain implants like Neuralink posing profound threats to our true human identity and changing sociology completely. Our burden of labour in reading and writing the world makes us who we are, with AI increasingly influencing our decision-making, cognition, and freedom in accessing media and expressing worldviews; drastically swing with AI having the power to reshape our thinking and responses, subjugating and altering our perceptions and interactions. The current trajectory of improving technologies risks alienating our humanity steering us towards a symbiotic relationship with AI blurring the distinction between our human cognition and technological influence.
Figure 2: Roser, M. (2023). AI timelines: What do experts in artificial intelligence expect for the future? - Our World in Data. Our World in Data. Retrieved 2023, from https://ourworldindata.org/ai-timelines.
In a game-changing development, tech entrepreneur Elon Musk ushered us into a new era by introducing its Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) Neuralink’s “N1 implant” designed for cyborg symbiosis by transferring our brain’s content to a machine and vice versa. This biotech innovation recently became FDA-approved for human trials as features monitoring and influencing brain data aiding users particularly those with motor neuron diseases. As impending integration of AI assistance intensifies the impact, prompting profound questions on the subsequent decline in human importance when AI becomes capable of simulating all of our brain functions thus the company believes humans must merge with AI to become more capable beings (Kulshreshth et al., 2019). While AI advancements are outpacing human capabilities, a societal shift is underway, potentially transforming our original thinking processes and propelling us toward a cybernetic race reliant on AI-driven decisions. The authors in Science, Technology and Society mention that “I think I saw X,” is depersonalized to “X was observed by the researcher.” This is further edited to “It has been observed that X,” and ultimately transformed to “X is” (Bauchspies et al., 2008)”. Implying how technology is transforming cultural ‘truths’ shaping our perception of science, progress and facts will shift focuses; just as humanly we mistakenly believe many myths as factual; technologies with AI will possibly unethically create misinformation and increase the chance of people’s ideology, leading humans to become more different from what our intuition, belief and integrity helping us make and shape our personality and originality.
This represents the idea of the cyborg identity that Haraway mentions, as AI connects us to a trajectory of losing our ways to feel like humans with the senses to our limitations and emotions becoming more prominent to its governing patterns. Figure 2 reinstates the continual progress towards opening up new possibilities for understanding one’s identity in more fluid and dynamic terms and challenging traditional notions of fixed identity, helping us better understand when and how likely a general human-level AI is expected to become a reality, stating, “It would be a machine that can learn to do anything that a human can do (Russell et al., 2022)”. This defines AI and emphasizes its possibilities, as surveys conducted show the results of experts when they believe there is a 50% chance that human-level AI can exist, with some defining human-level AI as unaided machines able to accomplish every task better and cheaper than human workers. It is inevitably changing our world on an economic and sociological scale as the majority of experts agree and think that in the coming decades, there is an even chance that we will see AI technology impact our world in a transformative way. Another such AI-powered technology is exemplified in Figure 3 showing, Meta’s next Ray-Ban Stories smart glasses that are poised to redefine the way we engage with technology, content, and each other (Alattas, 2023).
Figure 3: (Image via Ray-Ban) Alattas, R. (2023, August 27).Meta’s next Ray-Ban Stories Smart Glasses with livestreaming and whispering capabilities, from https://medium.com/reemtech/metas-next-ray-ban-stories-smart-glasses-with-livestreaming-and-whispering-capabilities-cc700a72557d
The possibility of creating cyborg symbiosis using AI algorithms shapes our identities through social media and news, having the power to affect our perception and expression according to its algorithms. Keywords for Media Studies states, “[…] passing on knowledge can reinforce existing power structures and conceptions of reality (Ouellette, 2017)”. This implies how our conception of reality is visioned through social media and smartphones being a daily part of our lives, making users more confined in a “surveillance society (Layton, 2001)” constantly being in a fragile state of existence as our privacy is becoming a commodity. Now, imagine a world with AI where not only non-visible trackers and cameras are on you as well as an AI-governed world where your memories are being recorded and actions can be predicted, according to Meta’s researchers by using our brain scans the contents of our thoughts can be read by AI, a team of researchers in Meta is working towards making that our possible future reality, stating, “This result confirms that self-supervised learning leads AI systems to learn brain-like representations: The artificial neurons in the algorithm tend to be activated similarly to the physical neurons of the brain in response to the same image (Benchetrit et al., 2023)”. This envisions potentially a vastly beneficial vision of the future where people with speaking disabilities will be able to communicate, with future generative AI having abilities to represent our thoughts into actions integrations of such technologies into our social media and smartphones will then help us detect our emotions and phycology more efficiently.
Finally, we are at the start of a new era of generative AI and increasingly connecting to our everyday technologies and cybernetics that will considerably impact our future generation’s sociologies, while giving countless benefits, it will also have autonomy over our understanding of creativity, originality and expression. Although some fear that these new AI-powered technologies will considerably take away many of our existing job titles, we must stay hungry and curious to see them as tools for a better future. Just like the creation of a calculator made us more intrusive to solving difficult problems and seeking those opportunities, echoing many tech experts, researchers and investors’ ideologies of AI’s visioned future; helping us become more limitless than ever, “Being the creator of artificial intelligence, we shouldn’t hold ourselves lower than the creation. (Kulshreshth et al., 2019)”. On the negative side, companies like Meta, Google and Microsoft will have more access to what we are looking at or what we even think raising concerns for privacy and autonomy. At this current trajectory unprecedented breakthroughs are being achievable because of AI’s involvement in fields from health sciences to everyday usability; though we are still in the early development stages and we will only become better with these technologies it proves the point of how truly powerful if a tool AI can be. Now, we are on the verge of creating a generation where these future individuals’ identities will be further apart from their predecessors than ever with technologies that will merge with their existence and sociologies powered by AI symbiosis.
Reference
Alattas, R. (2023, August 27). Meta’s next Ray-Ban Stories Smart Glasses with livestreaming and whispering capabilities. Medium. https://medium.com/reemtech/metas-next-ray-ban-stories-smart-glasses-with-livestreaming-and-whispering-capabilities-cc700a72557d
Bauchspies, W. K., Croissant, J., & Restivo, S. (2008). Science, Technology, and Society: A Sociological Approach. Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
Benchetrit, Y., King, J.-R., & Banville, H. J. (2023, October 18). Toward a real-time decoding of images from brain activity202. AI at Meta. https://ai.meta.com/blog/brain-ai-image-decoding-meg-magnetoencephalography/
FitzGerald, J. (2023, May 26). Neuralink: Elon Musk’s brain chip firm wins US approval for human study. BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/health-65717487
Kulshreshth, A., Anand, A., & Lakanpal, A. (2019). Neuralink- an Elon Musk start-up that achieves symbiosis with artificial intelligence. 2019 International Conference on Computing, Communication, and Intelligent Systems (ICCCIS), 105–109. https://doi.org/10.1109/icccis48478.2019.8974470
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