What do I mean 'I'm not anti-tech I'm just pro-human'?
Seriously, what's my problem? Don't I believe in progress? Let's see...
My little tagline for this publication is 'I'm not anti-tech I'm just pro-human' and today I thought I'd unpack that a bit.
First, why do I feel the need to make this statement at all? Because, unfortunately, despite the internet providing access to a myriad of diverse and nuanced opinions from around the world, somehow it also reduces everything to a binary and I find that if you are not vocally in favour of any and all technical "progress" then you are wont to be branded a Luddite or caveman.
For example, a recent commenter (a nice, polite and articulate one I hasten to add), countered one of my more skeptical AI articles with this:
When automobiles arrived, they weren’t welcomed with open arms. The horse-drawn cart industry decried cars as dangerous and unreliable. But the real issue? Cars were disrupting their livelihood. Progress doesn’t stop. Cars won, and transportation was revolutionized.
He's not wrong, and I'm not anti-car but I remain pro-human, which means I believe that cars need regulation for all of the reasons I shared with him:
I don't believe progress is a synonym for good. Take cars for example; every 24 seconds one person dies in a road accident. That's 1.35 million people per year. Globally, over 500 children under the age of 18 are killed on the road EACH DAY. Road traffic injuries are the leading cause of death among young people aged 15 to 29 years (UN). In 2022 cars and vans worldwide emitted 3.53 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide accounting for around 10% of global emissions (Statista) and goodness knows how many respiratory illnesses. Then there's the fact that the thirst for petrol in developed countries keeps questionable regimes in power with appalling human rights records in developing countries.
Bearing all this in mind, is it possible that the car was maybe NOT the most progressive option when it came to improving transportation and that investment into public transport could have served us all better?
My point is, the Internet, cars, even AI are actually neither good nor bad, they just are. They exist in a quantum state; being both positive and negative at the same time until someone puts them to use. I use my car to drive my daughter to school and my mother-in-law to hospital, occasionally I even use it to drive canned foods or toys to charities. But I could also use it to drive into a playground full of school children if I wanted, or even by accident.
You see? The car itself is neither good nor bad, it is the use to which I put it, which is why that use is regulated by the authorities - to minimise the harm I can do. I have to be licensed and insured to drive it, I have to wear a seatbelt and, despite being capable of driving at over 200kmh, I have to keep it below 90kmh even on the fastest roads (in Singapore). I feel the same about all technologies, but even more so about AI.
What makes AI so different?
Perhaps nothing, except the people building AI keep telling us things like this:
AI is one of the most important things humanity is working on. It is more profound than electricity or fire.” Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google
“AI is the new electricity.” Andrew Ng, Co-founder of Google Brain, former Chief Scientist at Baidu
“AI will change the world more than anything in the history of mankind. More than electricity.” Kai-Fu Lee, AI expert, former president of Google China
“AI could be the most important technology humanity ever develops.” Demis Hassabis, CEO of DeepMind
Based on this rhetoric I have to treat it differently. It is still neither inherently good or bad but the upsides and downsides are vastly greater than perhaps any previous technology except the nuclear bomb (which nobody ever mentions🤔). That is why I feel compelled to counter the relentlessly utopian rhetoric coming from these people who, of course, stand to make the most money from it.
Despite what you may be thinking, I'm a hoot at parties. I'm not trying to be a downer, an accusation often thrown at people like me to try and shut us up. I just think it's important to highlight the harms as well as the help it might bring. Harms such as AI deepfake scams and abuse, which affected 300 million children last year as well as adults including German journalist Patrizia Schlosser who found pornographic pictures of herself online produced with an AI app but decided to hunt down the perpetrator and film it, below✊.
My own family has been the victim of AI scams in recent weeks with both my niece and brother-in-law conned out of thousands following deepfake phone calls from “friends” in distress and desperate for a loan to help them out.
Red tape ruins everything, right?
There is a saying in business that the US innovates, Europe regulates and Asia imitates. Well, thank goodness for that because if everyone, everywhere was 'moving fast and breaking things' at the speed of Silicon Valley we'd be screwed.
Time and time again the US has shown us the consequences of unchecked corporate greed whether it was Big Tobacco burying smoking studies in the ‘60s, Big Oil burying climate studies in the ‘70s, Big Pharma lying about the addictiveness of opioids beginning in the ‘90s or Big Finance lying about sub-prime mortgages in the 2000s, all so they could continue making money long after learning about the harms they were perpetrating.
And now, in the 21st Century, it’s Big Tech’s turn to bury the evidence of the harms caused to teens by social media (Meta) or the evidence that they secretly performed emotional experiments on nearly 700,000 users (Meta) or that Cambridge Analytica harvested the private data of 50 million users to manipulate elections (God, Meta really are the worst!). But the others are almost as bad; Google has been fined over $12billion in the last decade for monopolistic practices, Amazon buried competitor products in search results and raised prices using a secret algorithm, Apple stands accused accused of abusing its position to crush competitive app stores, Open AI for illegally stealing copyrighted content to train its models, etc, etc, ad nauseum.
These companies are undoubtedly the most innovative in the world and capable of extraordinary feats but that doesn’t exempt them from scrutiny because they are, demonstrably, the greediest too, and given an inch they’ll take a mile so it is imperative we hold them to account. Don’t forget, four years ago they were all avowed democrats and now…
For the record, I don’t think there is anything wrong with being a Republican, but it’s pretty clear that the ‘broligarchy’s’ allegiances are up for grabs, and so is their tech.
Tech (uh!), what is it good for? Absolutely everything (and that’s the problem)!
So, as I have insisted repeatedly, I’m not anti-tech I am just pro-human and I am really looking forward to seeing what new technologies, including AI, will do in the areas of cancer detection, drug development, energy transformation and climate change. But at the same time I would really like to see a rollback of tech for tech’s sake (QR code menus and self-service checkouts anyone?), and a lot more regulation aimed at protecting humans from scam, fraud, pornography and potential Armageddon. If that makes me a Luddite or caveman, so be it!
To Do List
My recommendations for new things to read, watch, look at, listen to and do.
This headline is just delicious and the article even more so: AI Company Asks Job Applicants Not to Use AI in Job Applications 😋
Myles Delfin, who was the first guest on the Pro-Human Podcast, has just been nominated for the prestigious 2025 Earthshot Prize, hear exactly why on Substack, YouTube, Spotify or Apple Podcasts now.
Britrockers Feeder are coming to play the Hard Rock in Singapore on Wednesday 2nd April and implore you to join me for fuzzy guitars and infectious choruses: https://www.sistic.com.sg/events/feeder0425.
That’ll do ya! Cheers, Nx
Perhaps all the talk is just slick marketing? I really can't see what the big deal is. Statements like AI is bigger than electricity, when it is a product of electricity and impossible without it, just show to me that the people spruiking it are either involved in hilariously over the top pumping of their own products or frankly delusional.
Indeed, Neal! The human behind the product is the significant variable. Is a knife a tool or a weapon?
Personally, I find AI a useful tool, a hyper-google, for checking trivial questions. But I prefer to do my own thinking. The best history professor I ever had told us that we students would soon forget all the details we learned. What he hoped we would leave with was ‘intellectual self-reliance’. He gave us the tools to observe, analyse, evaluate. That, to me, is where AI falls short. We will stop being intellectually self-reliant.
Incidentally, I happen to be watching a compelling drama series called ‘The Capture’. Talk about deep fake.