so what is it?

The emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) is frequently depicted as a precursor to an inevitable clash between humans and machines—a bleak scenario where AI either overpowers or erodes the core of our humanity.
 
 But what if, the rise of AI presents both challenges and opens opportunities for what it means to be human.
 
What if it’s not the technology that we are fearing but the reflection of our own selves?
 
We are generally shaped by what drives us and what we respond to. At the core, the heart of human experience involves compassion, storytelling, and finding meaning to the life around us. We are intellectual homo-sapiens capable of understanding complex things about all that surrounds us and continue to seek all that’s unknown. 
 
So, what’s AI
 
“AI algorithms are an attempt to replicate the pattern of how neurons work, how vision works, and it’s a bunch of nit neurons or little micro, non-intelligent pieces that fire together. And that, together with our whole physical being ecosystem, causes us to be intelligent. It’s been around for decades, although there have been some recent improvements. But the thing that kind of really unlocked everything was the ability to apply scale computing, which is hundreds of computers working in concert and closely networked. Hundreds of thousands.”
 
Described by Reid Hoffman
 
Algorithms curate the news we read, the products we buy, and even the people we meet. In this sense, AI is not just a tool but a participant in the ongoing construction of our reality. It forces us to confront important questions: What kind of world do we want to live in? What values do we want to uphold? How do we ensure that the technology we create serves to enhance, rather than diminish, our collective humanity?
 
He continues…

“It’s not just that we’ve built a technology but have created generative capabilities that now enable computers to learn. But what they learn is what they learn through us- every choice we make from what we create, what we see, what we consume and what we don’t. And from that learning process, it allows them to act in ways that 10 or 20 years ago we would’ve said, “Well, that’s what intelligence is.
 
Human intelligence and knowledge is siloed to the extent that any given person or any given discipline has certain special knowledge, certain and perhaps vast repositories of knowledge, but that because of the scale of the internet and of computing now, this technology has access not just to the full sweep of all kinds of human knowledge, but it takes them out of the silos and can see them together.”
 
What we see in the world of technology is a canvas of our own humanity.
 
When GPT-4 was trained, it was trained on two trillion-plus words, which is many, many words, we could only read in hundreds of lifetimes.”
 
What we often overlook is AI learns from humans, it’s essentially a student of humanity - a mirror of how humanity is as it interacts and is represented on the internet.
 
When we come across trillions of information on the internet and whatever we choose to consume is influenced largely by micro choices we make as collective through human reinforcement feedback - where the AI learns, unlearns and relearn.

Our life as it is has a vast shift in how we see ourselves and a collective shift in the very nature of our being.
 
We’ve shifted to what Reid Hoffman would say, homo-techne.

We are constituted with our technology. It’s what gives us super human-powers from having a conversation thousands of miles away to using bionics. Homo-Techne doesn’t necessarily make AI overpowering humans but more like AI being a friend - a supporter, a guide.

By no means can it ever replace human interaction but taking Covid as an example - Internet was a single medium that kept us connected and together.
 
So, if AI is what we weave to build something and if it’s something that brings us collective together for better, then can AI be a companion, a friend to us, and not something that’s going to diminish our sense of self?

For example- all great things in history have come together with people coming together as friends - friends that create a safe space for you to grow mentally and spiritually.
 
So, if the future of AI is every individual having a personal AI assistant helping them to navigating life’s challenges from fixing a light bulb to how do I respond to an awkward conversation with my colleague. These tools are a possibility to improve our own humanity i.e., if we keep ‘humans’ at the very centre of it.
 
How we construct AI affects who we are and the very nature of our being. Many say, AI is value neutral but I tend to disagree. It certainly holds value. For example: there’s freedom of speech but we do have ethical and moral regulations. It hold value towards how AI projects us as whole. 
 
Asking fundamental questions such as: How can this truly serve humanity? How can it elevate us to be better? How can it uplift us as collective species?…
 
Questions like these are foundational. This is when human intelligence is amplified to how we use AI and especially, how we build them.  
 
The future isn’t to fear AI but to see a companion that’s there to uplift the quality of human life in all forms.