As AI technology advances at an increasing rate, the general consensus is that by about the year 2045, it will reach a point called the “singularity,” where it will surpass human intelligence.
AI capabilities are progressing at an astounding rate—doubling every five or six months—and it has come to a point where I can no longer ignore its existence in my daily life. A world I only saw in movies and video games seems to be rapidly becoming the norm.
I have loved science fiction since I was a kid, enchanted with the world I experienced in books and in movies and keenly interested in the evolution of technology—to the point that I was looking forward to the day when my kids brought home humanoid friends.
But as AI advances and the science-fiction worlds I once dreamed of come closer, I’ve started to feel fear instead. I realize that the coming era is one that may be beyond the grasp of my tiny mind, but my biggest worry is that we may no longer be able to distinguish between what is real and what is not.
Deepfakes, falsified information, and synthesized speech are already of such high quality that they seem entirely real. Fake news, fake videos, and AI-generated opinions are already circulating across the internet, and this reality produced by AI has already begun to dominate people’s awareness.
I’ve always thought that the capitalist world we live in is nothing but an illusion.
Even though true abundance is equally within everyone’s reach, we are born into a world that is overflowing with things, reliant on slips of paper called “money,” and trusting in leaders and public opinion. The evolution of technology is transforming our reality and giving rise to another reality that is itself uncertain. As a result, we are beginning to realize that we are trapped in a capitalist bubble created by Western society which has made us believe that living in this bubble will bring us happiness.
But the reality created by these values is different than the one generated by AI. I think that more sophisticated AI technology is shaking our definition of “reality” to the core. AI precisely analyzes our attention, our emotions, and our choices, hacking into our brains and manipulating our perceptions of reality. We think that we are acting out of free will, when our reality has already been curated for us by algorithms. In other words, we no longer have a shared reality or shared values—instead, each of our “realities” is increasingly customized. The scary part is, that the more fake a reality becomes, the more convincingly real it feels.
My mother raised me to trust in people, and to readily accept things as they are without doubt. But she was also the type of person who would check the numbers her calculator spat out by flicking an imaginary abacus in the air.
These days, I’ve turned away from her advice—never taking information at face value and always challenging things with a critical eye. Still, as she taught me, I do think it is important to value the information I collect through my own senses in order to truly understand reality.