This is the next world. A Time of Ar­ti­fi­cial Life and In­tel­li­gence. An age in which every de­sign choice re­flects a vi­sion for hu­man­i­ty. A hope that can eas­i­ly over­look con­crete lives. Be­cause of poor judge­ment, we may al­ready have lost con­trol over the con­se­quences of our choic­es. It is a mo­ment that har­bours both the per­ils of un­fore­seen con­se­quences and the haz­ards of an un­prece­dent­ed form of agency, not a new form of in­tel­li­gence. The an­ti­bod­ies have not been de­feat­ed, and their cau­tion­ary tales are a vivid chron­i­cle of how near the sin­gu­lar­i­ty is.

Ma­te­r­i­al abun­dance and peace­ful democ­ra­cy may make life less un­bear­able, but the world is a dan­ger­ous place. The chal­lenge on the hori­zon is the ef­fort to pre­serve life it­self in the face of a long, at­tri­tion­al per­ma­cri­sis. A time of erod­ed re­silience and cas­cad­ing in­ter­con­nect­ed dri­vers. And one day, a day which you can­not see now, the ma­jor­i­ty will be noth­ing but noise, and a few will be a sym­pho­ny. The ma­jor­i­ty will no longer need to strug­gle to find the mu­sic they love; Spo­ti­fy will pre­dict their plea­sures. They will not have to dis­cov­er books through serendip­i­ty on a shelf. AI sug­gests them based on read­ing habits eeri­ly like their own. They won’t have to ex­plore; they won’t get lost.

They will not wres­tle with de­ci­sions. They will mere­ly scroll as the al­go­rithm of­fers a nev­er-end­ing ban­quet of cu­rat­ed dis­trac­tions. Hu­man agency will be erod­ed by pre­dic­tive al­go­rithms, and this ero­sion of in­de­pen­dent eth­i­cal rea­son­ing and au­ton­o­my will in­ca­pac­i­tate so­ci­ety. The ma­jor­i­ty would have scarce­ly imag­ined a world in which sheep car­ry track­ing de­vices that know ex­act­ly how they like to be herd­ed. When that time comes, you will have to know what to do. You will have to play by the right rules.

And those rules will not be your rules. The rules would be a chal­lenge to free will as al­go­rith­mic pre­dic­tion shapes be­hav­iour. Ad­vanced pre­dic­tive al­go­rithms will not just ob­serve hu­man be­hav­iour. They will shape it by cu­rat­ing our op­tions, me­dia, and choic­es. The race is for com­mer­cial dom­i­nance, se­cure geopol­i­tics, larg­er da­ta lakes, and mod­els with lim­it­less pa­ra­me­ters. The om­nipresent, om­ni­scient, in­creas­ing­ly om­nipo­tent AI ma­chin­ery will stream rec­om­men­da­tions about what to watch on Net­flix, what to buy on Ama­zon, whom to date on Tin­der and Hinge, and what to be­lieve on In­sta­gram. We will seek com­fort, not great­ness; en­ter­tain­ment, not strug­gle; se­cu­ri­ty, not risk. We will avoid deep thought and re­ject grand as­pi­ra­tions. We would have found hap­pi­ness.

Once, hu­mans val­ued over­com­ing re­sis­tance as nec­es­sary for true great­ness. Per­haps the ma­chine that gen­er­ates art, code, and ideas with­out ex­pe­ri­enc­ing “re­sis­tance” or the emo­tion­al weight of cre­ation may ul­ti­mate­ly pro­duce trite, sur­face-lev­el out­puts. Out­puts that may even de­hu­man­ise its mak­ers. Un­like hu­mans, which are a chaot­ic web of dri­ves and will, the ma­chine op­er­ates com­plete­ly on log­ic and pro­grammed rules. Love­able will build our per­son­al and busi­ness web­sites; Copi­lot will draft doc­u­ments and sum­marise lengthy ar­ti­cles; Eleven­Labs and ArtList will gen­er­ate im­ages and videos from text prompts; Mythos will pro­vide au­tonomous cy­ber­se­cu­ri­ty; and hu­mans will have AI co-work­ers.

This is the ar­chi­tec­ture of vis­i­bil­i­ty, which am­pli­fies on­ly what is vis­i­ble and shapes our choic­es. As AI be­comes high­ly ef­fi­cient at an­tic­i­pat­ing hu­man de­sires, the gap be­tween AI’s sug­ges­tions and hu­man ac­tion will con­tract. In­side the new al­go­rith­mic de­ter­min­ism, our choic­es will be ar­chi­tect­ed by code. Moral deskilling will di­min­ish the ma­jor­i­ty’s ca­pac­i­ty to de­lib­er­ate, em­pathise, and in­de­pen­dent­ly nav­i­gate eth­i­cal dilem­mas. Re­ly­ing on ar­ti­fi­cial moral ad­vi­sors may lead to the over­sim­pli­fi­ca­tion of com­plex hu­man ex­pe­ri­ences in­to stan­dard­ised, op­ti­mised math­e­mat­i­cal re­sults.

No one can slow it down. Every­thing is ac­cel­er­at­ing. Noth­ing can free it from the log­ic that turns AI in­to an in­stru­ment of ex­clu­sion and dom­i­na­tion. In­de­pen­dent over­sight, ro­bust le­gal frame­works, and in­formed users are silent as po­lit­i­cal sys­tems ab­di­cate their re­spon­si­bil­i­ty. No one will be able to find the still point in a turn­ing world.

Be­cause AI is hu­mans. It takes on the fea­tures of those who de­vise, reg­u­late, and use it. AI is not neu­tral. The in­trin­sic in­hu­man­i­ty of vi­o­lence will be ac­cel­er­at­ed by the trans­for­ma­tion of de­fence in­to threat pre­dic­tion. Vic­tims re­duced to e-SIM card num­bers and GPS lo­ca­tions. Vi­o­lence will be op­ti­mised and at­tacks fa­cil­i­tat­ed with­out look­ing in­to the eyes of the col­lat­er­al. Once, the in­dus­tri­al rev­o­lu­tion tamed the wild­ness out of ex­is­tence, as so­ci­eties or­gan­ised them­selves around ef­fi­cien­cy, pre­dictabil­i­ty, and sta­bil­i­ty.

Dur­ing the in­fos­phere rev­o­lu­tion, the ma­jor­i­ty may be will­ing to ac­cept the no­tion that hu­man lim­its are de­fects to be de­spised and over­come. Or can it be­come the mo­ment when AI’s de­vel­op­ment par­al­lels a trans­for­ma­tive jour­ney that could re­de­fine hu­man civil­i­sa­tion by har­mon­is­ing tech­no­log­i­cal in­no­va­tion with eth­i­cal con­sid­er­a­tions, en­sur­ing AI’s align­ment with al­go­rith­mic jus­tice?

Dr Fazal Ali com­plet­ed his Mas­ter's in Phi­los­o­phy at the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies. He was a Com­mon­wealth Schol­ar who at­tend­ed the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cam­bridge, Hugh­es Hall; the Provost of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Trinidad and To­ba­go; the act­ing Pres­i­dent of UTT; and the Chair­man of the Teach­ing Ser­vice Com­mis­sion. He is the Pres­i­dent of NI­HERST and an ex­ter­nal ser­vices con­sul­tant with the IDB.