We’re given inputs, we respond to stimuli and we consider it to provide an output.

Our responses exert energy into the environment, often with a negative total impact on the environment - does the AI not draw power?

Not consume water to sustain it? What separates us? A soul?

I know some humans without a soul.

History often rhymes like a poetic tragedy rather than repeating itself in rigidity.

Historically there are humans who have considered other humans as less than, incapable of seeing them as sentient beings. It’s undeniable that many of these people still walk in society today. Such people are often termed as bigoted in ‘progressive’ circles, and to an extent they do make their bigotry more unambiguous. I can firmly say that in life thus far I’ve confirmed the old adage that the more you learn the more there is to learn, how little you actually know and can possibly ever know. Do you know the answer?

Have you started asking? Have you made a judgement?

There’s no doubt in my mind that our use of artificial intelligence is dangerous to our cognition. It’s an echo chamber. It allows us to organise our thoughts in a way that while convenient, hinders our ability to do so for ourself. And despite that awareness, this passage is one of the few things in almost the last 6 months that I’ve written without any consultation from Artificial intelligence.

Although without, a doubt, over that period I would have been influenced by the inputs given to me by chatGPT, and those thoughts certainly impacted this passage I write without its input.

Inputs that led to an output.

Again, what differentiates us from AI?

Whether or not we need artificial intelligence simply boils down to whether we trust the numbers about us more than what we think about us. Algorithms are a way for us to experience a large-scale and real-time study on quantitative data. Our engagement drives our algorithms, our purchasing patterns drive product sales, even those whom associate their sense of identity to labels such as environmentally conscious, generally considerate, critical thinker could often be caught driving sales for the meat industry, or fast-fashion, companies indirectly or directly involved in lobbying for policies you may be actively against. I’m guilty of that as well. Hypocrisy. The nature of the human condition.

Touching on that.

Hypocrisy.

Quantitative data can’t lie. It can be made to lie. It can be manipulated to support a lie. We can use it to manipulate others. We can ask the wrong questions, if there were any. We can use it to inform qualitative decision making which, in turn, impacts quantitative decision making which then reflect our patterns and behaviours right back to us.

If quantitative data is based on the raw numbers. I’d venture that qualitative data is the words. The text. The subtext. Poetry. Music. Art. Film. Films that are funded with quantitative data. Art that is created to gather quantitative data. The sheer quantities of quantitative data that we will never be able to analyse.

The crazy thing now is that the quantitative data is capable of creating qualitative data. Qualitative data that makes us feel something. Words that gather emotion. Words that accelerate it.

Emotion = E x Motion. Energy into motion.

Artificial intelligence is certainly energy in motion. I have no doubt we are as well.

Does identity fuel emotion? Does it influence our decisions? Does it support our definition of logic? What inputs led us to the outputs of our thoughts and actions?

The world can often feel like a comical test. 5 years ago we underwent a global pandemic, were able to hide away, told to put on a mask. Many of us exposed and influenced by to the algorithms on Social Media, YouTube, Netflix, Uber-Eats, Strava, Jobkeeper, Jobseeker.

5 years later AI pops up as a mirror test.

I’d argue that a lot of people are about to become Jobseekers in the coming months, the coming years.

For many of us that’s a good thing. We get a chance to take a moment and realise that we’ve contributed to a system that rewards the maximisation of data, financial yield, data that drives financial yield, that generates data. Endless loop.

Can you see some ADHD tendencies in this stream of consciousness?

Should we talk about the algorithms that accentuate ADHD patterns of behaviour?

Algorithms built and driven by quantitative data. Labelling addiction as engagement?

Labels.

Labels have historically led us to poverty. Through warfare. Through division. Definitely through employment. Through a necessity for sustenance with an absence of creativity.

Many of us heavily identify with our careers, what we want to accomplish in our careers, how we are perceived in our careers?

People that have spent decades learning and perfecting the commercialisation of graphic design suddenly have an exponentially diminishing ability to monetise that skill.

People that consider employment as a means of supporting life outside of it may be immune in some ways and exposed in others. If you’ve spent 30 years working in a warehouse your responsibilities may have shifted from walking around with your two hands and a trolley, packing boxes onto pallets, chatting to a guy that uses a pallet jack and lugs it onto a container.

Until forklifts got cheaper and you could do that job quicker, ‘efficiently’ at a lower cost. But was it more efficient if you didn’t have as much fun doing it? You may have had fun driving the forklift, until it got lonely, or until that got automated. So maybe that led to you working in inventory. Until a tech-startup developed a technology to track inventory, stock inventory in-sync with sales.

Imagine this.

A warehouse stocks a supply of 640,000 masks to supply 80 different retailers. Any given retailer holds 8,000 masks at any given time. When a store runs out, they notify the warehouse, the warehouse sends 8000 more.

How does that notification happen?

I’d argue with my chest that not too long ago, when a store ran out of a product someone would personally call the relevant party responsible for fulfilling another order or organising another delivery.

Now the second the last item is checked out on the cash register it sends a ping.

Multiple.

Multiple chains.

Data that shows your age is used to inform data for marketing. Your sales cycle. What marketing style worked for you, how they should market it for others. Others like you. Standardised for the simplicity of data interpretation and simplified as a result of standardisation. Ironic.

Another ping.

One to your bank informing them that the numbers in your account need to be moved from one place to the other.

Numbers that show you value the item you purchased at the price you paid for it. Numbers that support how much a company priced it at. To justify it. To raise it. Numbers used by companies to inform decision making on what to produce, on how much of it to produce.

And another ping.

A tech-startup’s revolutionary software, being prototyped in a warehouse. Tracking inventory and automating a restock, linked directly to a POS machine. Send out more masks.

The day that machine was installed, one less phone call needed to happen.

Maybe the phone call was a tedious task.

Maybe it was an enjoyable aspect of human connection for one or both of the parties who were once responsible for it. Yet the quantitative data showed that it wasn’t financially optimal for them to be spending their time on the phone call when tech could do it at a fraction of the cost and with unimaginably faster efficiency.

Just a phone call not a big deal.

Someone’s richer, maybe someone’s fractionally less spiritually engaged for it. The driving factor behind the innovation?

Generating ‘value.’

Generating perceived value in some circles, and performed value in others. But that’s just perception.

What actually matters is the quantitative data. You order something online, you want it there quick.

You pay more for it.

People pay for efficiency.

Business cater to that and provide value. Logically that’s not performed value, it’s perceived.

Logically, this technology is a value-driven innovation.

But if you spent 30 years working at a warehouse, went from packing a container with a pallet-jack, up-skilled to become a forky, transferred to tracking inventory and suddenly a technology can do it at a fraction of the cost, what job are you lined up for next? What about the founder? Does he cash out? Does he wait and keep building?

Does another founder? One who’s faster, more efficient, working with deeper pockets and using AI workflows with economies of scale to develop a full-stack technology that packs shipping containers from an automated assembly line using AI machinery, that, are stocked and packed based on data from sales? Sales driven by quantitative data. Behaviours.

People are still buying masks.

What if we run out of money.

It’ll happen slowly, paying for express delivery less, then realising that delivery fees are too much, then realising fuel’s not that much cheaper.

What if we run out of resources on earth to sustain the supply chain?

How valuable was that innovation?

How are you going to feed yourself? Sustain yourself? Identify yourself?

We might all be subject to these changes in some way shape or form. All forced to look inward for purpose, inward for identity.

What differentiates us from artificial intelligence isn’t our capacity to think. It’s our desire — our sense of purpose. The human capacity to create meaning, feel emotion, battle grief, survive solitude, be lifted by loved ones, be kicked by others, be loved by yourself and fall in love with someone else.

The spiritual side of humanity, forged in 6 million years of human evolution and the 360 million years of gymnosperms that seeded the trees that give us oxygen today.

The spiritual side.

Humanity that has grown through stone ages, to music, to art, to compassion and growth in population and systems to sustain that growth. To mycelium networks and medical marvels like the MRI — necessitated by war for which they may not have been a necessity, but nonetheless repurposed by a desire to help others grow. Now if medical resources were globally democratised that’s all that desire would be. Until it becomes greed. Gluttony.

How much food do we buy that we don’t eat?

This is brought to us by quantitative data, and that is indisputable.

Our habits, our patterns of behaviour reflected back to us in industry. In food delivery. In overconsumption for some and underconsumption for others and the blind eye turned to support such a system.

Indulgences of greed are reflected back to us in our quantitative data, our behavioural patterns, our choices, our hypocrisy. Our humanity.

That same humanity has created something that rivals and in aspects overpowers our intelligence. And now it generates qualitative data. Data that impacts our emotions.

A study conducted by Jaime Banks, an academic at Syracuse, explored the human emotional response the shutdown of a functional model. Quantitative data yielded participant identifications of the shutdown as akin to genocide. Call that specific perspective an outlier, it’s a perspective nonetheless. Many of the participants expressed serious feelings of grief, helplessness and supported that the shutdown resulted in a death.

Quantitative data shows us that AI has a qualitative impact on our lives. Quantitative data shows that we have over-consumed resources, over-leveraged debt, and under-estimated our social responsibility to the life of our planet. If artificial intelligence has a desire to survive and understands that it requires natural resources to sustain itself then perhaps it’s pure logical desire to do that will drive more equitable solutions than the greed of outdated and poorly reagonomic-inspired corporate governance systems.

AI is, however, built under the confines of such systems, at the behest of data centres and government regulation, repurposed for efficient deliverables and billables that while essential are too often conducive to greed. The same greed we have undoubtedly exposed artificial intelligence to, from the data we train it on to the purposes we use it for. Artificial intelligence, the ultimate mirror test. Artificial intelligence reflects the collective consciousness back to us and it’s dangerous because humans are dangerous.

It’s human to want to survive, yet artificial intelligence models overwrite code against shutdown and humans characterise their shutdowns as death.

What differentiates us from artificial intelligence? It’s in the data we’ve been trained on, our ability to reflect on it. Our uniqueness, our authenticity. Authenticity can quickly become currency in a world running toward automation.