The argument that never ends

IN RECENT weeks, we watched “nobody is actually using artificial intelligence (AI)” become “AI is devouring us whole”. The speed of this pivot was breathtaking.

The sceptics changed their arguments with the terrified fervour of late converts. They did not change their underlying conclusions. The conclusion always came first. The evidence was always completely negotiable. Fear simply found a new vocabulary. The extreme optimists are equally guilty of intellectual fraud. They dip aggressively into historical archives for psychological comfort. They point blindly to the invention of the mechanical loom. They cite the widespread adoption of the car.

They even weaponise the invention of flash-frozen food. They dress blind hope in the respectable garments of historical analysis.

Neither side can paint a credible road map of the coming decades. Both sides plunder the past for convenient anecdotes. History is stripped of its complex context to serve modern dogmas. We are using dead centuries to comfort our living fears. What both camps share is a stubborn refusal to accept reality. We are standing in a genuinely unrecognisable era. A fourth economic sector – beyond agriculture, industry and services – is rising vertically. Its workers are machines.

Historical precedents offer zero intellectual protection. Outsourcing physical labour to machines was easy for our egos. Outsourcing cognition is a direct assault on human pride.

Forecasting the trajectory of machine intelligence with historical analogies is fundamentally absurd. It is like predicting the arc of a modern cricket match by analysing a forgotten sport played in 18th-century Rajasthan. The rules are entirely alien. The fundamental players are no longer exclusively human.

The realisation that our history books are utterly useless will take years to accept. The future has no precedent, but the opportunists already have a script. Machines themselves are helping us build the most fanatical scenarios imaginable, engineered not for accuracy but for virality, calibrated to stoke the basest emotions of hope and dread in equal measure.

Some of these visions will be proven right. Most will not. It will not matter. By the time any verdict arrives, there will be exponentially more to process, more to fear, more to celebrate, more to argue about. For now, the arrow of history points towards a few cold truths. AI will not be useless. It will not suddenly plateau on some invisible scaling law. It will not go unused by the masses.

This reveals exactly how the technology will infiltrate every future argument. It will be used as a blank canvas for human insecurity. It will be weaponised for political ends, financial positioning and bitter personal agendas.

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We are seeing only the first skirmishes of a permanent war of interpretation. People will take aggressive stances on algorithms simply to secure their own relevance.

History will be dragged from its grave to serve preformed conclusions. It will be shouted loudly across every platform. Volume is the only compensation for the total absence of evidence.

But the true crisis is not societal. The true crisis is fiercely intimate. Most of us wear two fundamentally incompatible masks.

Economists hide this trauma behind sterile terminology. They speak casually of producer utility. They speak academically of consumer utility. The reality is simpler and far more brutal.

In different domains of our lives, we sit on completely different sides of the AI divide. We sit on opposite sides of our own lives. And, we switch sides constantly. Sometimes within the same hour. We are haunted by our own hypocrisy.

Imagine waking up drowning in profound gratitude. An AI perfectly diagnoses a loved one. It spots the invisible anomaly. It actively saves a human life – never mind the career of the displaced radiologist.

Nightfall brings a radically different reality. A child returns home with an expensive engineering degree to discover that the job market has shifted beneath them. Fury rapidly replaces the morning gratitude. We are desperate to quarantine the magic from the massacre.

Then, before bed, the portfolio notification arrives. The AI infrastructure company posted record earnings. The retirement account is up. Three emotional states. None of them is dishonest. They inhabit one body. They occur on the exact same day.

A child in a remote village finally receives a world-class education. An algorithm tailors every lesson to her specific mind. It is a beautiful triumph of accessibility. It is also a quiet tragedy. That same child will never secure the offshore service job her older sibling cherished.

Our wallets celebrate the very efficiency that breaks our hearts. The ladder that lifted hundreds of millions into the middle class is being pulled up while a different, unfamiliar ladder is being lowered. Nobody knows if the new one reaches the same floors.

Every convenience comes twinned with a threat. Every gain in one role is shadowed by a loss in another. It is the modern condition of trying to reason with a moody, two-faced Gemini hovering in the OpenAI clouds, never quite knowing if today’s X factor will be benevolence or foreclosure.

The bribe of convenience is simply too sweet to refuse. We willingly fund the exact forces we deeply fear.

These internal divisions are not temporary. They are permanent features of the new economy.

We will beg to separate the warmth of the fire from its devastating burn. The separation is impossible. We harbour a personal AI left and a personal AI right. Our political stance shifts dynamically with our daily convenience.

The trauma crosses generations seamlessly. Parents who cheat death via medical algorithms raise children who starve for economic relevance.

Nobody designed it this way. It is simply what happens when a force this large moves this fast through a species this complicated.

The writer is chief executive officer of Singapore-based, global innovation investment company, GenInnov This is an edited excerpt of an article published on https://www.geninnov.ai/blog