Written by Sharnaya Panag on Digilah (Student Tech Research)
I am Sharnaya Panag, a graduate of O. P. Jindal Global University with a Journalism and Communication degree. I am fascinated by the hold machine and IoT has on our species, knowing that what has become of us, cannot be undone. My greatest interest is understanding and writing about our Psyche and the future we will create for ourselves.
Can mankind’s unquenchable thirst to make life easier lead to our own downfall?
It was around 5 million years ago that for the first time, the planet witnessed the breakthrough of sentient life. Nature created a species so astute, one that would never act on behalf of the will of the planet, but the will of itself.
Since Man’s inception, there has been one thing that has remained constant throughout our history. If the past has shown us one thing it is that humanity will go to great lengths to create a life of increasing comfort.
We have a very deep connection with our past, as our ancestors left behind a trail of evidence to help us decode our history. The more we read, the more it helps us to communicate with the past.
One can take a look through manifold scriptures, some pieces of literature or even just a page out of a diary, and for a moment the reader gets to delve into the mind of somebody who lived ages before they did.
This highlights the significance of reportage, why is it so important for us to report? Not just for the present, to spread awareness, but also to leave proper documentation for the future to analyse, just as we have been doing with documents of the past, trying to connect the dots of history.
Over the course of our time, man has remained invested in breaking through to new technological advances to make everyday life easier.
Machine was created to cut down on physical labour and for the first time, the world saw the mass production of goods in rapid time.
Fast forward to 2023, and we are now sitting in a world entirely supported by machine. The time of self-sufficiency is over. In our society, our lives wholly revolve around them for the sake of our comfort.
Phones, laptops, cars, aeroplanes, trains, ATMs, air conditioners, and heaters, are just a few appliances we use on a daily basis, without which the lives of many would crumble.
However, the invention that completely altered the course of our evolution would be the invention of the internet. 30 years ago, on the 30th of April, 1993, the World Wide Web was made accessible to the public.
It crept its way to every nook and cranny it could and now trillion gigabytes of data are in the hands of each and every human being that can afford to access it. The overall pace picked up by humanity seemed to be quicker than ever before.
This, of course, was also not enough. Mankind is always willing to test its limits. Hence came the next chapter, the creation of an artificial body, an entity in itself. The creation of machine to decrease physical labour felt inadequate.
Man wanted life to be effortless, we consider ourselves so superior, that we refuse to even think for ourselves, therefore the creation of Artificial Intelligence. The most popular example of this would be Chat GPT, launched on the 30th of November, 2022, an AI created to help people structure their thoughts and opinions into words not written by themselves.
Artificial Intelligence is a body that has been created to think for us. To research data, store it, assimilate it, paraphrase it, and structure it in detail in the form required by the user. Chat GPT uses web scraping as a tool using automated methods to scan websites, retrieve data and synthesize it to provide the user with a well-grounded assimilation of it.
It also has a plug-in feature which allows it to interconnect with third-party websites. Chat GPT uses the Bing API which permits two or more computer programs to communicate and uses it to navigate through the web to gather data. It can cite every source so that the user has access to every website it went through.
Students are now using Chat GPT to write their assignments, and even people working in multinational corporations use it to assimilate data and statistics. The need has become so severe that people are now using it to write mail since formatting an e-mail has become such a task.
We are dealing with an entity beyond our understanding. A trillion gigabytes of data, endless information at the fingertips of this AI. The majesty of the human brain is undeniable, but can the brain possibly compete with an AI whose brain we can potentially attribute to the entire internet?
There is nothing stopping companies from permanently resorting to using AI to achieve profitability. The wheel is already set in motion, just in the month of July of 2022, the founder and CEO of e-commerce firm Dukaan, Suumit Shah took to X(formerly called Twitter) to announce that 90% of the customer crew of his company has been replaced by an AI chatbot.
He added that the response time has dropped from a whopping two hours to just three minutes and the cost related to customer care was brought down by 85%.
Being sentient beings, our species has evolved beyond belief. We have the privilege to read or write anything we desire in detail, and we can preserve our beliefs for future generations. The world today is obsessed with taking the easy way out because of how fast-paced society has become.
In the past writers, and documentarians from all over the globe went to great lengths to collect, assimilate, and structure data. People spent years trying to extract the information necessary, going through extensive bodies of work, scriptures, research papers, articles, books, speeches, and various other documents.
They did this all to keep the populace aware of world events, to provide them with entertainment or even just writing for fun.
At the centre of it all remains effort, and creativity. However, now there is an entity that can produce material in a matter of seconds, in turn reducing the effort we put in to educate ourselves, leading to the inevitable culmination of creativity.
Without creativity, our credibility to commit to the task will be put to the test. Our skills may fall short in the face of Artificial Intelligence. Looking at journalism and writing as an example, will man be able to make the effort and hold on to creativity?
The problem is that if our mind isn’t put to work, and is given constant chances to escape effort, it will lead to the impotency of the human brain. If the students of today use interfaces as a loophole to avoid the task at hand, the pattern will spread and over the course of time, it is bound to become a habit.
In the near future, resorting to Artificial Intelligence will become the norm, just as relying on machinery, technology, and the internet became the social norm.
The facts are displayed in front of us very clearly. Humanity must be able to spot the pattern otherwise all we can do is sit back and watch our own downfall. Companies will always vouch for their profitability and benefit. It will be difficult to hold on to reality as we know it.
There will be no jobs left for man if we accept and allow AI to become a part of our lives and the social norm. The progress of Artificial intelligence must be put to a stop or at least slowed for the preservation of the future of upcoming generations.
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