The arrival of ChatGPT, the primary iteration of AI to most people has caused an important deal of hysteria over the possible impact of this latest technology.

Most of that angst is around how quickly AI is more likely to eviscerate once stable careers and jobs. It may need seemed early on that perhaps self-driving truck would replace long-haul truckers; self-driving cars would make the taxi driver obsolete. This didn’t raise an excessive amount of concern, unless you were, after all, a long-haul truck driver.

But ChatGPT demonstrated that other jobs, similar to lawyers, Wall Street traders, writers and journalists, let alone students and teachers suddenly might find themselves unemployed, if not also unemployable.

Now there was angst amongst the elites.

But today, in an OpEd piece in The NY Times, Yuval Harari, writer of the best-selling Sapiens, raises a much more interesting, and much more frightening prospect — that AI will ultimately (and never that far off, apparently), come to switch and surpass human imagination and creativity.

“What wouldn’t it mean for humans to live in a world where a big percentage of stories, melodies, images, laws, policies and tools are shaped by nonhuman intelligence, which knows tips on how to exploit with superhuman efficiency the weaknesses, biases and addictions of the human mind — while knowing tips on how to form intimate relationships with human beings?”

There appears to be little query that AI goes to start out producing novels, music and even movies because the tech gets higher and higher and as microprocessors, following Moore’s Law (RIP Gordon Moore who died this week) get faster and cheaper.

Harari, Harris and Raskin are apprehensive concerning the implications of AI surpassing human capability for arts, music and each aspect of our entertainment and mental achievements. That is actually bad, but I feel the danger is way worse and much more frightening than even they imagine. This pertains to the wedding of AI with the manufacture of media.

The notion of Media itself is a comparatively latest event in human history. For many of our time on this planet, the concept of media barely existed. Prior to the invention of the printing press, the most important library in Europe was at Cambridge University — it held 40 books.

The printing press was step one into mass media, however the concept really took off relatively recent, first with the appearance or radio within the 1920’s, after which television within the 1960’s and eventually the net and all that has followed.

Today, we live in a world awash in media — just about all of it electronic and just about all of it video, film or television. The typical person today spends an astonishing 8 hours a day, daily, watching movies or TV or videos. That’s more time than we spend doing the rest. Your grandparents may need gone to the films once a month, and for an hour, they were transported to a synthetic world, considered one of Fred Astair and Ginger Rogers or Oz, during which they might escape the actual world.

Today, we’re essentially living in a movie show on a regular basis. We never leave. Our connection to the fake world isn’t broken now. Our sense of reality bears less and fewer connection to the actual world and is increasingly more a product of that which Hollywood or Netflix or TikTok manufactures for us.

After we turn over the making of content to AI, we create a tool that may deliver to us, on demand, at any time, a world that is totally constructed to our own demands, desires and fantasies. Tailor-made to our every whim; highly personalized, on demand and virtually limitless. We’ll now not have the shared experience of Shakespeare and even Spielberg. The true world will effectively stop to exist. We’ll live in a perpetual and never-ending dream world or our own making.

Perhaps as Climate Change makes the planet increasingly uninhabitable. it could be that a fake world is the one place that we discover livable.

It might be our fate ultimately.

As Robert J. Lifton once said, “ultimately, it could be proven that intelligence isn’t the perfect trait for the survival of a species.”

This idea is discussed in far greater detail on my latest book: