The Gen-AI Paradox
TL;DR Gen-AI (following called just AI) is creating weird paradoxes by either amplifying some problems it is said to solve or, more funny, destroying itself in the process of making work more efficient. I am taking the risk once again to publish something about AI that is not a marketing text, but genuinely tries to understand its potential. I also want to understand the public opinion and the reaction from stakeholders. To my person: I run an AI company, okay?
Recently, I was confronted with meaning in my life. As usual, I got fatalistic, and adopted extreme viewpoints such as extreme positivity or extreme fatalism.
Now, after a while of not writing anything and just building my open-source digital life and learning new skills such as marketing and people skills, I feel ready to write.
I hope the text will not criticize anything or insult someone. It is rather a practice in Satya (Truth). In the Yoga Sutras, Patanjali mentions that too negative a view on things or a judging mentality is disturbing our mind and an egoistic mechanism.
Thus, I want to practice seeing things as they are with this article. Thinking about AI and what it can do creates paradoxes.
Paradox — Efficiency
When AI can do a certain work, the work becomes meaningless. It is so cheap or unnecessary that the value of the work is questionable. If the AI is a capitalistic agent, it will essentially render its environment useless, and even though it served a purpose, it is making itself obsolete.
Example: If I needed help with doing bureaucracy, but an AI can do it for me, we will ask why should there be this kind of bureaucracy in the first place? So once an AI solves the problem, the problem all together with the AI disappears.
This is neither good nor bad, but it's just how this works.
Paradox — Creativity
I need to be creative by myself and that regularly. Only then I can be successful being creative. If I let an AI do that, my creativity is downgraded, and I can’t even use AI to be more creative.
Example: Anybody uses the same AI to be creative, so any AI output is hardly creative.
Paradox — Hard Work
In web development, there are a couple of things that are extremely hard work. These include deployments, maintenance and freaking extreme hard problem-solving (though this is the fun part). But as every case is so special and no one wants to share their deployment routines voluntarily, AI can’t do it. It would also be risky and dangerous to do it unattended.
However, this is what I would like AI to do for me. Hard work, so I can be more creative and do things I like, e.g. just do research. But the reality looks like that: AI is trying to take over the creativity side of my business, e.g. writing, science, programming and leaving me with the hard work, e.g. maintenance, deployments, security and so on.
Paradox — Interactions
The more you interact with AI, the less social you are. But, the society is social. If you interact with AI instead of interacting with society, you are not part of the society any more. How then did it benefit society?
I mean yes, if you were full of hatred you would say: Good that you are gone, but realistically we need every one to take part in society, and otherwise it can’t work.
Paradox — Dependency
The more AI is doing for you, the more dependent you will get on it, the less value you have. Thus, by making you dependent, the AI again degrades its value because it lowered your value.
If AI does not help you, why is it centralized?
Conclusions
Many people in the spiritual realm know about these paradoxical situations subconsciously so that they don’t enjoy reading tweets, or spend time on social media. Spiritual people rather practice ownership and do teaching, even though AI is doing all of these things for them. A game changer for your life is ownership. Put that on repeat.
Why? Because it's a paradox, the less relevant you are for society, the less relevant AI is becoming for you (and society) because it degraded your value.
I think there are nice use-cases for optimization problems and the technology can be extremely enabling, but it also creates these or even more paradoxical situations.
It is probably bad for my reputation to publish this (but I tried to learn from my other stories which were inferring in my professional life). But as I am getting constant real life shit-storm since months, who cares?
I know you can’t just criticize AI, but as everyone is talking about change, I feel we should acknowledge the paradoxical situations and change the way we think about AI.
I tried not to criticize AI, but rather make aware of how it works. At least it's not my intention to make AI sound bad. I build my career on AI, too. So it’s an honest attempt to shift the direction into something meaningful.
So long, and thanks for all the fish (and your attention). I am giving my best, to clean myself from kleshas. ⛵️ Please clap-clap and follow me 💪
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