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Artificial Intelligent technology has been making some serious waves at the moment.

With a prediction that 90% of online content will be generated by AI in the next two years, thanks to apps like ChatGPT that help absolutely everyone, from students to scientists, write papers and essays, the ubiquitous tech is clearly here to stay.

There’s even an AI lawyer now, for crying out loud.

Since AI has the potential to make us humans look like a mere footnote in the history of life on this planet, we most certainly need to have a conversation about it and eventually embrace it as a way of life on this planet.

Iain Thomas, a poet, novelist, and new media artist, along with Jasmine Wang, a technologist and philosopher, shared insights about the present and future of AI from their new book, What Makes Us Human: An Artificial Intelligence Answers Life’s Biggest Questions.

AI, they say via Fast Company, is kind of like the invention of the steam engine; “You can look at a steam engine and understand that locomotives follow that, but you don’t see the entire Industrial Revolution, because all of the use cases haven’t been explored yet”.

They might as well have been involved in the writing of Her, one of the more lovely movies about future technology and the potential to integrate AI into our human lives:

#Bales2022FilmChallenge (creator @bales1181)

29. Internet Focused Movie

Her (2013)

This is such an intriguing concept. . . it finds a man falling in love with a charming AI. pic.twitter.com/4gFmaZIe8I

— Nikolai Adams (@filmizon) October 29, 2022

The writing pair reckon that AI is a new way to interact with creative works, culture, and media:

AI is a way to democratize creativity as well, where anybody and everyone can create in ways that otherwise would not be accessible to them.

…In a way, AI is like a turntable of culture in the same way that a DJ can pull a record backwards and forwards to scratch it, creating new kinds of music. We can use this technology to create and do new and different things, and to engage with those things in different ways. Just like the rise of hip-hop, where people used sampling to create entirely new forms of expression, we’re at the dawn of a new era in terms of how we experience the world around us.

Indeed, making people look magical, ethereal characters from the distant future is just the beginning.

To exhibit how we can work with AI to better understand our human experience, Ian and Jasmine put all the most ‘profound, poignant, spiritual, and awe-inspiring texts from mankind’s history’ together, and ask AI to answer the question about the meaning of life.

As such, a pattern emerged and the AI kept returning to three unique principles:

The first is that love is the meaning of everything. Love is the purpose behind our lives; the reason why we’re here. The AI came back to it again and again in many different ways.

The second is the idea that we should return to the present moment—that Heaven, Paradise, is found within this present moment. As soon as we start to leave it, and we start to dwell on the past or become anxious about the future, we begin to suffer.

The third principle, the one that was apparently the most prevalent, brings the first two together nicely:

It was this idea of connection, that we are fundamentally connected to each other and to the universe around us.

While we need AI to remind us of these fundamentally human things, that is not to say that AI is sentient or beyond humans.

Rather, AI is made up of the collective wisdom of mankind:

We record our thoughts by writing them down. If you take a piece of technology and get it to analyze all of our thoughts to find the patterns in our language, then you’re going to be speaking to the sum total of who we are. Thus, when you do sense something on the other side of this technology, what you’re sensing may be the sum total of who we are.

Beautiful. Thanks, AI. Humans are cool.

So there you have it, folks, the meaning of life is love, connection, and staying in the present moment.

It may also be ’42’, depending on who you ask.

[source:fastcompany]