Opinion
When I was younger, I read The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells, listened to the rock opera album, and saw various adaptions on the screen. I often wondered what would happen if we were invaded not by hostile aliens, but by kind and supportive visitors from an advanced civilisation far away.
Imagine if people came from outer space and simply asked how they could help.
They could come to my lab and not just tell me which experiments to do, but perhaps give me the results of every experiment, so we wouldn’t have to do any work at all.
They could do this across society.
They could resolve disputes. They could take everything into consideration, and give us the best possible solution to every problem.
In cases where there were trade-offs, winners and losers, they could explain when we were in the ‘sweet spot’, so that we would at least know, and would avoid thrashing about trying to improve complex challenges, where improvements were not possible.
Perhaps they would help with personal problems too. Every child might get a guardian, perhaps a kindly alien aunt and uncle at birth; people to guide them as they navigated their first friendships, their first schools, and their first romantic partners. Perhaps these all-knowing beings could establish dating apps that would identify perfect matches, saving everyone from rejection and heartbreak.
They might cure all diseases, then look into our genomes, integrate the knowledge with our environment and activity profiles, and estimate the moment of our death.
They could enhance renewable energy generation and harness that to support artificial food production, creating an age of abundance.
They might even tell us who would win the next World Cup, but perhaps that would fail because the team they named might slacken off in training. Thus, there would be limits, since some predictions are self-influencing.
Nevertheless, these friendly aliens would change the world.
Would you invite them down?
Sometimes, people wonder why aliens have never really visited us and one reason among many is that an advanced species would appreciate that visiting might not be a good thing.
Of course, I’m not really talking about aliens here, am I?
I’m talking about AI.
Many people are wary of AI because it may come to threaten human life and development.
Humans need two things: purpose and community, that is work and love.
AI could quickly undermine purpose.
Next, since the bonds that hold communities together often depend on committing to a shared purpose, AI could end up undermining both our communities and our work.
The internet, or rather social media, has already changed society. Many believe it has driven polarisation, diminished trust, and destabilised democracies. Others, that it has damaged mental health, especially affecting the young.
AI will also have significant social impacts. But it is too early to say what they will be.
For centuries, science fiction writers have warned us about machines. In 1872, Samuel Butler wrote a Gulliver’s-Travels-like novel Erewhon (a wordplay on nowhere backwards), about a place where all machines were banned. In 1909 E.M. Forster wrote The Machine Stops, warning of the dangers of depending on machines. In 1959 Frank Herbert started writing the Dune series, describing worlds that were futuristic but oddly had no computers, because computers had been banned in an earlier age.
Humanity strives to develop technologies that introduce comfort but whenever it is achieved – as it is in The Odyssey with the lotus eaters or in Huxley’s Brave New World’s via soma – the outcomes for humans are not good, because too much comfort undermines work and community.
But many human things will survive. The Olympic Games will survive. Despite machine after machine being invented, and despite the drugs, the human Olympics remain more interesting than the Enhanced Games, and more interesting to many than mixed media events like car races too.
Human learning will also survive. People still love trivia nights, and beyond this, because conversation is so deeply connected with what it is to be human, we’ll all need fuel for conversations. Conversation depends on learning. Especially learning that is relevant to your local community or perhaps your academic tribe. Students will still come to university to learn and to connect with their tribe.
At present, there is a strong emphasis on equipping students to use AI. But like the internet, AI will be made to be intuitive – the business models require this. To me, the emphasis should remain on training students to keep building their own knowledge, then using advanced AI like Alphafold to predict protein structure in senior years.
But I planted a trick above. AI is nothing like friendly aliens.
AI brings nothing new.
It could not have created Nobel Prize winning discoveries like CRISPR, though it can accelerate research. Mostly, it will just summarise existing knowledge and make some of the committee papers I read boring, average, and often very average. It cannot be brilliantly original, and it cannot see into the future, and make discoveries in the way a mountaineer can see further, or a scholar can mine deep knowledge and discover unimagined treasures that are deeply buried.
The aliens would bring new discoveries, but AI cannot do that.
AI is being oversold for business reasons.
Yes, it will add value, but it will not replace researchers or creative artists. If we are careful, we will use it well; but we must be cautious, as most of the authors of the past seem to suggest that humans are seldom good at handling new and powerful technologies.
Professor Merlin Crossley is DVC (Academic Quality) at UNSW