Craig Allen

The last two years have been quite eventful, to say the least. A few job changes, and finally landing a role where I’ve been able to grow a lot over the last 9 months.

AI has become an inevitability in my daily work as a developer, and I’ve been thinking a lot about why some people are so excited about it.

I thought back to the early days of Google and other search engines that preceded it. They functioned as a way to connect people, by giving us the ability to find something that someone made. However, it still removed the human connection. Instead of a conversation, it was an asynchronous communication to someone in the past. Someone who wrote some content, designed the layout, and published it.

That led me to look even further back to publishing of the written word. The printing press is hailed as the technical masterpiece that catapulted us forward by making it easy and affordable to mass product books and other written material. But again, these are communications from one person at one time to many in another.

What preceded this invention was storytelling. For millions of years, all the historical information about societies and families was passed down to each generation by those who had either lived it or been told by the previous generation. A long lineage of stories preserved and passed along without being written down. No searchable databases, and nothing to train large language models on.

Eventually, this led me to a few questions:

• Are we moving away from interpersonal connections? If so, why?
• Do we prefer (consciously or subconsciously) fewer direct interactions with each other?
• Is society evolving that way naturally or because of these changes?

While growing up in the age of the internet and lightning fast technological revolution, I was told (and believed) that technology had the power to connect us. Social media was sold as a way to help us keep in touch or find old friends, which it did at first for a few years. But as it evolved, it began to show us only what their algorithms think we want based on our engagement, further homogenizing us into our confirmation-biased silos.

And for what? Attention is the new economy, or so we are told. The goal is to keep us scrolling mindlessly so we can be served more ads and they can collect more data. We are the product, and we are giving away our privacy one post, like, comment, and share at a time.

The bigger point to all this is that as a society, we become easier to manipulate and control when we are divided. Maybe that was the plan all along, or maybe it’s a coincidence. The people in charge of AI and LLMs are not instilling much confidence that they can be trusted to do what’s best for everyone.

I’m more anxious than ever about the world we are creating and will leave behind for our children. I wonder what their kids will say when they are told about this period of time.

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This article was written, edited, and fact-checked entirely by a human without the use of generative AI.