Examines the implicit occupational imperative that, to be economically competitive, we must continue to integrate with emerging technology -- and the dangerous precedent that this sets.
Host: Hutch
On ITSPmagazine 👉 https://www.itspmagazine.com/itspmagazine-podcast-radio-hosts/hutch
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Episode Introduction
Examines the implicit occupational imperative that, to be economically competitive, we must continue to integrate with emerging technology -- and the dangerous precedent that this sets.
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Resources
Elon Musk Code Conference 2016 Interview - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsixsRI-Sz4
FDA Greenlights Neuralink Human Trials - https://www.reuters.com/science/elon-musks-neuralink-gets-us-fda-approval-human-clinical-study-brain-implants-2023-05-25/
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For more podcast stories from Cyber Cognition Podcast with Hutch, visit: https://www.itspmagazine.com/cyber-cognition-podcast
Watch the video podcast version on-demand on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLnYu0psdcllS12r9wDntQNB-ykHQ1UC9U
Cyber Cognition
Episode 2 - Resistance is Futile
Hello everybody and welcome to the second episode of the Cyber Cognition podcast. As always, I am your host, Justin Hutchens (AKA Hutch).
And today’s story begins in the Star Trek universe. And I realize this next statement will likely alienate about half of my audience here, but growing up, I was not a huge Star Trek fan. Of the two major options, I definitely found myself more in the Star Wars camp. And that’s not to say that I thought it was the superior option, it was just what happened to appeal to me as a kid. But there was one Star Trek movie in particular that really stuck with me from my childhood — and that movie was “Star Trek: First Contact”, released in 1996. This particular movie stood out among the rest because of its uniquely diabolical antagonist — the borg.
In the movie, the Borg was a collective of cybernetically enhanced beings from various species that have been integrated into a hive-like consciousness known as the Collective. The Borg's primary goal was achieving perfection, which they sought to attain by incorporating other cultures, technologies, and species into their own through a process they called assimilation. When met with resistance, they would often refer back to the catch-phrase, "Resistance is futile," -- reflecting their perspective that everyone across the universe would ultimately have to assimilate.
Assimilation by the Borg involved the physical augmentation of the individual with cybernetic implants, but perhaps more significantly, it involved the subjugation of the individual's mind and will to the hive mind of the borg collective. The assimilated individual would lose their individuality and become one of many voices in the Borg's collective consciousness.
The reason that I bring this up, is because I believe there is a lot of parallels between the Borg collective and the occupational imperative of integrating technology into our personal and professional lives.
Let’s start first with the premise that, in a way, we are all, already cyborgs. In the same way that the borg would assimilate others into the collective, we have integrated technology into our lives and become intrinsically bound to the collective knowledge repository that is the Internet.
In a live interview at Code Conference from 2016, Elon Musk described this symbiosis. I’m going to play a brief clip of that interview —
We already have… we are already a cyborg. You have a digital version of yourself, or a partial version of yourself online in the form of your email, and your social media, and all the things that you do. And you have basically superpowers with your computer and with your phone and the applications that are there. You have more power than the President of the United States had 20 years ago. You can answer any question. You can video conference with anyone anywhere. You can send a message to millions of people instantly. You can do just incredible things.
In this interview, Musk suggested that we have already augmented our own capabilities through the use of technology. And this is absolutely true. In the modern era, our natural identities are intrinsically and inextricably bound to our digital identities. Our digital identity is just an extension of ourselves, established by augmenting our own capabilities through mobile computing technology and constant access to the Internet.
And year over year, there is an occupational imperative to integrate newer and newer technology into our capabilities in order to remain competitive and functionally relevant. This was true of computers, the Internet, mobile technology, social media, and many other forms of technology.
The occupational imperative to integrate new technology is apparent at both macro and micro levels — that is to say, it is apparent both at the business level, and at the individual level. To remain competitive against other businesses in the market, companies must adopt the latest and greatest technologies, or they are left behind. Similarly, to remain competitive in the workforce, individuals must adapt their skills to these new technologies or they also are left behind.
In the modern world, if your business doesn’t leverage the Internet, email, social media, and other technological capabilities — for all intents and purposes, they don’t exist. Similarly, if you as a worker are not able to effectively integrate into a work environment where all these capabilities drive business, by having the skills that correspond to those technologies, you are not hireable.
We are seeing this cycle repeat itself all over again with the emerging AI arms race. As a business consultant, I can tell you that nearly all of the businesses I work with are already asking questions about how they can integrate the latest AI technologies into their current operational workflows to improve their efficiency. And the expectation that individual workers personally adapt and integrate these capabilities into their own personal skillsets is also already apparent.
A phrase that has been trending across social media for several months now is — “AI will not replace you. A person using AI will”. And here, within these words, we can once again see that same occupational imperative – adapt or be left behind. You must assimilate. Resistance is futile.
There was a documentary released by Netflix in 2020 called The Social Dilemma. If you haven’t seen this film yet, I cannot recommend it highly enough. This film does a fantastic job of highlighting all of the negative impacts that have emerged as a result of the transformation of society stemming from the monetization of the previous generation of artificial intelligence and machine learning. These consequences range from the polarization of social politics, the massive increase in mental health problems, the amplification of disinformation, and of course, surveillance capitalism – the fact that we now allow the big tech industry to collect obscene amounts of data about each and every one of us, which they then use to persistently attempt to predict and manipulate our consumer behaviors.
We are just now beginning to realize the extreme consequences from this first cycle of rapid AI integration into our lives. So, it seems like the prudent thing to do, would be to ask ourselves now, what the potential or likely consequences are of the rapid integration of these new forms of artificial intelligence into our lives.
And perhaps even more important, is the question of where this slippery slope leads us. In the past, the occupational imperative was integration with computers, mobile phones, the Internet, and social media. Today, the occupational imperative is integration with Large Language Models. If we continue down this path, what will the occupational imperative be in the future?
On May 25th, the brain-computer interface company from Elon Musk called Neuralink, officially received approval from the FDA to start human trials. Musk’s long-term vision for this company is to provide a low-latency connection to artificial intelligence systems. I’m now going to circle back one more time, to that same interview from Code Conference 2016 – where Musk then followed up his previous comments with a description of his vision for the brain-computer interface – being built by Neuralink.
Its something that I think is going to be quite important. And I don’t know of a company that’s working on it seriously, is a neural lace. So, going back to the AI situation, and this is quite important today. If you assume any rate of advancement in AI, will be left behind by a lot. So, I think the solution that seems maybe the best one, is to have an AI layer. If you think of you have your limbic system, your cortex, and then a digital layer, sort of a third layer above the cortex, that could work well and symbiotically with you. But the constraint is input/output. We are I/O bound. Particularly output bound. Your output level is so low. Particularly with a phone, your two thumbs are just tapping away. This is ridiculously slow. Effectively emerging in a symbiotic way with digital intelligence revolves around eliminating the I/O constraint.
In Musk’s vision, rather than having to type a question into a web interface to get an answer from a system like chatGPT, your input will be dictated by thought. And rather than having to read a response from the system, the system output will be cognitively available to you as if it was your own thoughts. You will have unrestricted cognitive access to all recorded knowledge by simply thinking about it. In this way, it is not hard to imagine a potential long-term trajectory that is something akin to a universal consciousness. And while this may seem appealing to some, it seems that we could also lose something of our own identities, and even our own humanity in the process.
Even more unsettling, is that system biases and misinformation that these systems are prone to, would become inherited biases of your own. And you would become so accustomed to unfettered access to all the world’s information, that a system outage would be something akin to a fit of cognitive impairment or an episode of psychosis.
And yet, as unsettling as this vision of the future is, it would also likely be paired with the same occupational imperative. To be competitive – you will have to assimilate. If you do not adopt the brain-computer interface, you will be replaced by someone who does. Adapt or be left behind. And as always – resistance is futile.
If we continue down this path and adapt our lives repeatedly with each new revolutionary technology, then the human experience over time is going to continue to become drastically different than it once was. Perhaps we need to ask ourselves, if our repeated compliance with this imperative is setting a potentially dangerous precedent. Where does this road lead us, and is there a possibility that we lose our humanity (in part or in whole), at some point along the way?
And that’s all for today. As always, this is Hutch – broadcasting from the last bastion of the human resistance. Thank you all for listening and we will catch you on the next one. Over and out!