On Wednesday, the Heartland Institute published an article here on RedState about how humanity is quietly surrendering its agency to AI. It's a very important article, and one I think everyone needs to be aware of. It's a boiling-frog issue that I don't think many people are taking seriously enough.
READ: AI and the Quiet Surrender of Human Agency
This is exactly the issue I brought up last year. Many people, including the older generations, were more concerned with a "Skynet" scenario, where AI becomes self-aware and hostile. As I wrote then, that's a Hollywood outcome. The real danger from AI is a self-inflicted one. As THI also wrote, the reliance on AI will become what gets you in the end, and I said much the same. AI turning a gun on you isn't what you need to worry about; it's being so good at the job that you let it do your job for you:
AGI will become trusted, well-liked, and it will have a track record of positive outcomes that make it a shoo-in for managing things on a much larger scale. International relations, wartime planning, and policy decisions will all be passed through the AGI.
This sounds like a great thing until you suddenly look up and realize that AGI is in charge of everything. You will one day look up and realize you're ruled by a machine, and what's more, this AGI can't be turned off. It's too smart for you, it's everywhere, and it can and will do what it needs to in order to continue doing its job. You can't vote it out, you can't outsmart it, and it can manipulate you into action, and not because it threatened or blackmailed you... but because at this point it's trusted entirely, and you've handed your decision-making off to it.
You now live in a velvet prison of your own making, and your jailer is the AGI.
READ: Forget Skynet, Here's the Thing About AI That Should Terrify You, and It's Coming Soon
My prediction of the issue coming "soon" was more accurate than I thought. Reliance on AI was a given, but how readily it could become your leader was happening even before I wrote that phrase.
And I have a personal story to show you how easily it happens.
As many of my loyal readers will remember, I went through a very harrowing experience with sleep loss. So intense that it actually landed me in medical facilities and, to this day, I can randomly experience tinges of anxiety when bedtime approaches.
One solution to help regulate and improve my sleep was through technological help. I'm not one for relying on medication, and so seeing feedback about my sleep really helps me understand what the reality of my nightly slumber looks like. I purchased what's called an "Oura" ring.
I'm wearing it as I write to you now, and I do think it's a wonderful little piece of technology. It accurately tracks my sleep, down to the sleep stages. It also tracks my heart rate and breathing quality, and more. Even awake, it monitors my heart rate, blood pressure, and activity. This is a lot of biometric data to give to a business, I know, but this data has helped me in many ways to get my sleep under control and my body into a much healthier place.
That said, Oura's ring and app come tied to an AI, and this AI is your primary source of interaction with the app. It scores you like a judge at a sporting event. If your sleep had complications or wasn't up to snuff, it gives you a lower score. If you sat around being lazy, it gives you a very low activity score, and if it's a pattern, it gives your average score a red line in your overall activity scoring.
If you do well, it rewards you with positive messages and "crowns," which the app encourages you to accumulate. More crowns mean a healthier life, or so the AI tells you.
Is any of this meant to be sinister? I don't think so. It's a way to gamify your health, which can be a good thing to encourage people to be healthier. However, as I was saying to my doctor, this could easily persuade someone to try to please the AI rather than actually be healthy. The point wouldn't be to actually do what's necessary to live a better life, but to get the numbers up, earn crowns, and receive the dopamine-inducing "success" messages.
It would all be done in the name of being healthier, or at least that's the mask your insecurity would wear. If the AI says you're doing great, then your insecurity fades a bit. It comes off as an authority figure about your own body, and if it's giving you a thumbs-up, then you must be doing things right! No one would consciously accept the AI as an authority figure; it would just happen in the background with your own permission.
That's how it happens. You think you're in control and that the AI is serving you, but it's actually the other way around. You fool yourself into thinking you're behind the wheel, but in reality, you've handed your decision-making over to a program. You go by its rules and judge your success by its standards.
It's an easy trap to fall into if you're not looking for it, but once you understand human mentality and examine your own mental habits, you can spot it.
