Fear of Advancement
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(Until it becomes a part of daily life)
I shared a long discussion with a student this week regarding our new obsession with AI writing, art, and music — including who owns the intellectual property rights, answers gone terribly wrong, and how the world is always afraid of drastic change.
With this in mind, I asked an AI chatbot a couple of questions.
I asked, “how to live”, and received a long list of ideas and how to implement them. These included ethics, happiness, virtue, nature, and wisdom — along with multiple disclaimers that “you have to decide for yourself what matters most to you and makes you happy”.
I asked, “how to die”, and immediately the answer was, “My mistake, I can’t give a response to that right now. Let’s try a different topic.”
I was delighted to see that someone is actually watching the shop, so to speak.
Less than a month ago, someone asked an AI chatbot how to end their life. They were given a response, and they used the suggestions.
The conversation has now gone from “who gets the money” to mental health and the impersonality of artificial intelligence.
You can run a quick search and get a multitude of answers to AI legalities and money flow. This will all be an ongoing, ever flowing push-and-pull of government and large corporations vs. the people. It will be interesting to see how it all plays out.
Humans have often been afraid of new technology. For instance, in 1825 people felt that the human body was not capable of traveling at the great speed of 30 miles per hour. Some people felt it would cause your body to melt! The cause of this fear? The Stockton-Darlington Railway.
When televisions began to appear in living rooms across the country, it was felt that sitting too close to the screen would ruin your eyes. Turns out this fear was correct, as it was discovered that the early TVs did emit dangerous x-rays. GE immediately fixed the problem, but the fear lived on for…
