AI: friend or foe? (3 of 5)

previous parts:
A very brief history of art: In the beginning…
A very brief history of art: growing up

A very brief history of art: today

Now, half a century later, we’d feel naked and exposed without a laptop, a tablet, a smartphone, a smart toothbrush, an intelligent burglar alarm – and of course, running on them, software and firmware enough to smooth down any tiny fold in the fabric of our lives. And we’re still muttering.
OK, it’s very human to welcome the good with a nonchalant shrug (“Altana, scratch my back and get me a martini!”) and to reject the bad with disdainful contempt (“that bloody thing is eavesdropping on us all the time!”).
It’s perhaps less human but more honest to acknowledge that good and bad are two inseparable sides of the same coin: you want an electronic contraption to listen to all your whims but not to listen to what it shouldn’t? Oh, come on, every housemaid would do it!

What can we do to stop this wicked process before it swallows us all alive?
Bluntly and mercilessly, nothing.

Many tried to but no one succeeded so far: you may kill a man but not an idea, or a concept, or a piece of knowledge. The Holy Inquisition tried hard to gag Galileo for his heretic point of view about the universe, but she couldn’t prevent other scholars from weighing the Holy Scriptures against tangible evidence. A skilled scientist invents a device to dissolve all the bureaucrats in a puff of smoke (if only… 🙂 ); you may imprison him, even hang him, but you’ll never be sure that another one won’t come up with the same idea the next day.

Still perhaps we can do something to avoid being swallowed alive.

If you can’t fight them, join them…

that’s to say, while we reluctantly accept that a machine steals our job (we don’t seem to have much choice anyway) and acknowledge with poorly concealed envy that its work is sometime even better than ours, we can take advantage of it and meanwhile keep looking for something that the machine cannot do – metaphorically speaking, stop trying to make round vases and start decorating the machine-made ones with pictures that talk to the soul – whatever this word may mean. To the human soul, something a machine does not have. Invent a new job that only a human can do.

next part:
A very brief history of art (4 of 5): fight them or join them?