a bonobo humanity?

I don’t know what to think about AI. I did have a brief pub conversation with someone recently, who urged me to stop using Google because – I think something to do with AI and control of the internet, and perhaps global politics,  all to do with wealth and power. He seemed to consider it a matter of great urgency. I didn’t know what to think. Do I repeat myself…?

I presume the future of AI is ours to create. Thus, like many others, both expert and inexpert, I’m in two minds about it all. It seems that we’re aiming for an intelligence that’s superior to our own, but we don’t want to be made redundant. And we want it to be under our control, but who is the ‘we’ here? Yes, we want them to be smart enough to power machines that produce stuff, so we don’t have to waste our energy, but then, who owns the AI that produces the machinery that produces the stuff that we must needs buy? Our first trillionaires, perhaps – or do we already have them? In any case, as with technology generally, there are the winners, whose winnings will be massive, and the left behind. And it’s often a generational thing – as an official oldster, I wonder about the world my new-born step-great-grand-daughter will have to negotiate – no doubt more easily than I can negotiate the smartphone world. 

There’s also the worry that reliance on artificial intelligence will lead to the dumbing down of our own. It’s a worry I don’t feel for myself. As a kid, I loved encyclopaedias, of which we had two sets in the house. Via these resources and other books I read a lot of British history, sports history, the tragedy of ‘how the west was won’, and biographies of Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell and Ghenghis Khan. Now of course, the internet makes such information more accessible and comprehensive – self-education has never been easier. 

But of course AI is something else. Doesn’t it mean you and I don’t need to know everything, or anything? Knowledge and know-how will be off-loaded onto machinery, which isn’t really machinery. All software without the need for hardware. Which of course leads us to the doomsayers  – ‘This is how AI will wipe out humanity’, intones one video, which elaborates via 21 cheery chapters. Must I watch it all? But there are serious concerns of course. 

What seems to me most interesting and concerning is the possible development of AI agency. I imagine that the super-rich would love to have their products produced by unpaid, if expensive-to-build, AI bots. That would mean building in as much agency as possible, without, of course, having those bots turn against their trillionaire masters. So what exactly do we mean by agency in this context? (Be careful – when you look up AI agency – agentic AI, in the current jargon -, you’ll get an AI response – don’t believe a single qubit of those gaslighting bastards). It’s difficult to capture it without employing the complex terminology of the field – large language models (LLMs), tool calling, application programming interfaces (APIs), retrieval augmented generation (RAG), and other jargonesque concepts that I’m obviously completely au fait with. When we think of human agency, or any other animal agency, we think of what we do, the decisions we make, to enable us to survive and thrive in our environment, even to dominate it – certainly to control it to our advantage. Apply that to AI and it’s easy to see that there’s a bit of tension there, to put it mildly. 

So we don’t want AI to be too autonomous, but want to take maximum advantage of a system that we’re actively trying to make smarter than any human individual, and to make it – well, as autonomous as possible. There’s a contradiction there, methinks. However, I don’t feel too pessimistic about the situation, FWIW. We’ve been able to survive and thrive at the expense of other species for millennia. Surviving our own inventions – first, nuclear weapons, next AI, and who knows what lies beyond the horizon – presents new challenges. I say I’m not too pessimistic, but that’s not to say I feel greatly optimistic. Anyway, whatever happens, I’m sure the super-rich, or most of them, will survive. 

References

The Catastrophic Risks of AI — and a Safer Path | Yoshua Bengio | TED (video)

https://www.ibm.com/think/topics/ai-agents

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-03-02/ai-and-our-technological-future/104305614