Technology does not care about our expectations

One of the obsessions of science fiction (especially popular science fiction) concerning artificial intelligence is to portray it as a conscious, autonomous, and self-taught entity. In these narratives, AI is an embodiment of the Pinocchio tale, an ordinary machine that suddenly comes to life. And somehow, this story of AI as a being that acquires its own consciousness (for example, in the form of a new batch of machines in which a “spark” suddenly arises) has deeply permeated our popular culture.

But the reality of AI is much more complex, and indeed, much grayer. Language models like OpenAI’s GPT-4, for example, do not ‘come to life’ in the way promised in science fiction movies. Instead of being an autonomous entity with its own thoughts and emotions, GPT-4 relies on understanding patterns of human language and the ability to generate coherent responses based on those patterns. It is not a consciousness (a concept, moreover, still very nebulous, like intelligence), nor does it have desires, fears, or a human understanding of things. But at the same time, it is not a “stochastic parrot” or a fraud because it fails expectations that do not even come from its creators but from popular culture.

The most common tracks we have followed concerning artificial intelligence take us down very rigid paths, and the usual binarity of social networks reduces everything to “singularity or fraud,” narratives that move in search of nullifying the opposite and not explaining reality. We struggle to project intermediate stages between both narratives.

It’s a paradox: we dismiss AI for making mistakes, while at the same time, it changes our world in ways that are just as disruptive as in the promises, but much more subtle. Its impact on our society is not that of a machine “that comes to life,” “rebels against humans,” or “brings Eden,” but that of a process of cognitive outsourcing that will bring the dehumanization of new activities and skills on an unprecedented scale in the history of mankind (no wonder it’s called the fourth industrial revolution).

I don’t have an answer on how to change this perception. We lack a manual for this situation, and even hard science fiction authors who have dealt with these issues, like Ted Chiang, have written paradoxically conservative texts on the subject. For the type of AI we are dealing with, I recommend Blindsight by Peter Watts as a science fiction story that explores the line separating consciousness from intelligence and whether one can exist without the other.

It’s understandable, then, that what we say about current AIs is as ephemeral as they are. Many of the negative things still being written about ChatGPT, for example, really deal with GPT 3.5, the base technology of the free version of ChatGPT that was released in November 2022. I had a different opinion about this technology when I was using this version, it was an amazing and interesting toy, but a toy nonetheless. However, GPT4 (paid) was released several months ago, and the leap was such that almost nothing written about GPT 3.5/Free ChatGPT can be saved to talk about this new version.

It’s quite curious to witness how, in such a novel scenario, both smoke-selling futurists and doom-mongering pessimists wave futures that are actually quite worn out and recycled, a kind of “I told you so” chewed over for decades. And to some extent, this is normal, they are metaphors that were devised in a world where “the future” was the next fifty or hundred years, time frames friendly to certainties.

However, these old metaphors clash time and time again against an uncomfortable truth: we have no idea how this will have evolved in five years. Or two. We are surprised week by week, almost day by day. But I could venture that in a decade there will still be people dismissing AIs because they don’t solve everything, while, hurriedly, they try to learn new things because suddenly their knowledge and skills have depreciated more than the ruble in what we’ve seen of 2023.

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