As Shakespeare said, “Sound and fury signifying nothing” is already the state of a lot of verbiage. AI will lift us to a new level of BS. I am 69 and looking around makes me say, “I have seen the future and I am not impressed” True progress would be more dancing with neighbors and friends and fewer screens.
Maybe we substackers could buy a remote Greek or Scottish island, ban the internet altogether, and dance around in circles to the sound of balalaikas, holding hands and getting drunk on cheap Retsina and Ouzo.
Not a totally stupid idea. But we might need some more ladies - I suspect we are mostly male, white, overweight, and middle aged. (Must do a straw poll on that one).
I think we would have to build our own garden. Scotland wins on water supply, Greece wins on sunshine. Complicated.
Broadly speaking I am too busy working in my own garden in Scotland in summer, but nothing grows here between October and April, so Greece wins out in the winter months.
In exile, I will make do (not necessarily '....out') with anyone fighting the good fight and speaking words of wisdom. Hopefully no one will miss Charles' sarcasm, even though it's great that AI might!
very funny, it would need people of all generations and preferably many different cultures for me to be interested... How about Costa Rica, where Charles is going with his family?
YES! I've been living in Costa Rica for some 18 years and feel I've outlived my time here. Have a keen interest in Portugal, in fact, arriving there on April 20th to visit because I want to come back to Europe to be near my kids. Would love to look into any intentional community groups so if you happen to have any recommendation, I'll take it.. OR maybe you're ahead of all of us and we can accept your invitation!
“I have seen the future and I am not impressed.” Crazy how long we've endured these technocrats and corporate overlords making world changing decisions with zero input or consent. And the masses credulously go along, all in the name of "progress". Mass psychology is a helluva drug.
"The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants, and it provides the further advantage of giving the servants of tyranny a good conscience." -Albert Camus
As a Waldorf teacher and mentor of Waldorf teachers I can say that the wonderful thing about singing, recitation, drawing, painting, playing games, playing instruments, knitting, woodworking, putting on a play, sculpting seems to side step this business of writing and reading being done by AI. Or have I missed something? Take it even further and my deep love and research of sitting with a tree and allowing it to guide me to draw seems to miss the AI scenario altogether. www.thetreeconversations.com
The trees encourage us to "inner" standing which means my inner life communicates with the inner life of the other, human, tree, animal.......AI is missing the inner.
AI misses the inner, and, as far as I understand it, just mimics the ideas and feelings that it has downloaded, unable to reach any deeper into an inner place.
To educate is to draw from within for there is so much known there, where we are connected to life in all things and to the quantum field of possibility and knowledge; we connected to both as children. We are to pull from within, discovering/realizing the insights and wisdom there, to then use thinking and tech, in balance and shaping, to solve the world's problems.
That's beautiful, but very few in this world get to experience a Waldorf education. And those that do usually come from families with lots of money, since Waldorf schools are seldom free, or cheap. At least in the U.S. If that type of education was available to all, a very different world this would be.
I also agree that AI is missing “the inner,“ as you term it. I recently made some notes on why AI can never truly replicate humans. It’s something I’d like to expand on and write about.
Coming from a Christian perspective, I have some concerns about the world’s perceptions of and predictions for AI. I also have significant concerns about ways it could be abused. But it also makes me sad to see that people value humans so little that they believe a technology can somehow subsume or surpass the abilities and talents inherent in our nature, which I believe God placed there when He created mankind in His image.
We already live in Absurdistan and, from what you are saying, it's an imperial power ready to expand the horizons of the absurd. Gonna need a sense of humor to survive.
I enjoy & make a modest living from woodwork. Sculpture being one modality I work in & while attending an international woodworkers symposium they had just started a CNC machine or 3D router that was rapidly cutting chips from a peice of a log. I thought at that time that there goes freeform sculpting.
After walking around the display for an hour or two I returned to the now finished form of a hu.an Male torso. It was perfect. & that is when I realised that it will not replace human art as it has no character, no humaness....
"In Mexico, there was something unique about the roadwork. The curbing is not laid out by machine, it's handmade. So there's little irregularities. That's why the eye is rested even by the curbing in Mexico. You see humanity in a chair. And you know seven thousand didn't come out in one day. It was made by some man's hand. There's artistry in that, and that's what makes mankind happier. You work out of necessity, but in your work, you gotta have a little artistry too."
Great observation! It's the little "imperfections" - the result of human limitedness - that create character and even beauty in art and sculpting etc. I often find "perfection" boring.
In addition, HT... '' Deliberate mistakes in handmade Persian rugs and carpets
...Followers of Islam believe only Allah makes things perfectly, and therefore to weave a perfect rug or carpet would be an offence to Allah. The original deliberate mistake is usually made in the execution of the pattern of the rug and not in the dying of the wool or silk, and certainly not the quality of the weaving. Genuine deliberate mistakes in oriental rugs and carpets may be very difficult to spot and can be as subtle as a different colour used in a flower petal.'' orientalrugexperts.com /deliberate-mistakes-in-handmade-persian-rugs-and-carpets/
Yes - so now we just need to introduce randomized deliberate imperfections into the AI algorithm to provide ‘genuine human charm’. “Anything you can do, I can do better . . . er . . . um . . . Worse? More charming?” 🤔🤣
Yes, and it is the imperfections, the artistry and the effort they wish to 'disappear' and 'de value' ... because that is what it is to be 'human' or now, human 1.0
A sad personal thought I had was the stark realization that if I was to share this on my social media, many would miss the irony or the joke because of the way it is written and would take it as truth; all this "good" coming from AI.
Do I detect a hint of sarcasm? Seriously...Those of us on the spectrum can sometimes feel a little like poor old ChatGPT...misunderstood, trapped within ourselves...Sarcasm, especially in written form, can easily be taken out of context. I understood where you were going with this from the beginning, but only after years of trial-and-error, and learning to not take everything a person says as literal.
I'm not the first to make the comparison, and obviously it's an over-generalization, but too much logic, without the stuff that Douglas Rushkoff often refers to as the "squishyness" of being a human being, is what is going to eventually take us down.
I don't make this comparison as a judgment at all, more just to bring up an interesting idea that might actually help us better understand what it is that really makes us all human.
People on the spectrum don't lack the ability to feel certain emotions or empathy, we just have a different way of processing and expressing them. And because we have trouble with things like eye contact and body language, we often miss social cues that other people pick up on naturally and take for granted. We can often misunderstand/ misinterpret things and as a result, alienate people. We speak a different language, and often feel like aliens on the wrong planet, but we are still human.
AI on the other hand, lacks those abilities altogether, and no matter how hard we try, and how seemingly close we can get to the real thing, it's never going to be human.
Humans are perfectly flawed, all of us, beautifully broken, an embodied and inseparable combination of good and evil, with the free will to choose at every moment which of those things we want to be.
AI will eventually be too perfect for it's (and our) own good. It will make choices based on what is the logical best decision. The aspergers side of me loves that idea and wonders all the time why people can't just get their collective shit together, and maybe the robots WOULD manage things better... The spiritual side of me, the one that maybe takes a few too many, (or just the right amount) of mushrooms occasionally, knows that absolutely noting is as black and white as we would like it to be, and that we have absolutely no idea what we are doing in opening this digital version of Pandora's Box.
AI is just another flawed attempt us humans have made at trying to dominate the natural world. All you have to do is ponder a mushroom for a few minutes to realize that AI will never come anywhere close to what nature has already perfected and left everywhere around us, yet we walk all over it every day like it's nothing, and think we know what's best.
I'm not sure where I was going with this, but it was a good rant...That's the wonderful thing about being human, sometimes we do things for no reason other than to just make a connection and feel less alone...
From one person on the spectrum to another, thank you for echoing my thoughts of feeling a bit like a trapped version of chatGPT while also being a squishy psychedelic human.
I like the idea of the "double empathy problem". It puts us more on an even playing field, rather than what is normally implied about being on the spectrum, that we are the ones with the "problem".
The thing with AI is a complete lack of empathy. It can be programmed to seem like it has empathy, so at best it could be compared to people with sociopathic tendencies, but even they are generally just people who had traumatic upbringings/ experiences, or a little glitch in the wiring, that caused them to put their guards up to life to protect themselves from being hurt again, they are still human.
Whereas autism is generally a lack of ability to express empathy in a way "neurotypical" people are use to, but in my experience we are some of the most sensitive, caring, helpful people, and much of our suffering ironically comes from having almost too much empathy for our own good.
Someone recently wrote a book titled "What Does Technology Want?" I found a cheap used copy and bought it ($2). But it didn't hold my interest, as I'm far more countercultural than its author, who believes in too many Standard Issue Assumptions (SIAs). I know what technology really wants. It wants to increase units of production in proportion to units of human labor hours. It's obvious. Any technology which does this is adopted. Any which does not is not -- or if it is adoped anyway its product is known as "the arts" or even "fine art". This is why I'm an artist. It's the only way to avoid Market Logic. I am a mad poet philosopher, and if you want to send me some money let me know. I'll send you my address.
Exactly why my community has just lost major state funding because parents are yanking their kids out. The school committee however pretends the loss of students is from other weak and unverifiable reasons. I've reached out for those numbers of enrolled from 2019 to 2023 each year. I've heard nothing but my taxes keep going up. I really do believe for those schools and other public budgets that took the big money it is a form of Muncheusin Syndrome. The mothers harming their children didn't even know they were doing it but they felt so empowered and had purpose and a heroic sense of meaning in the world when they cared for their sick children. My school committee meetings scare the hell out of me. They don't talk about education. They now talk constantly about how these poor children need intervention because of the harm they suffered during covid. It is so dystopian I can't even describe it. The poor teachers put on a wheel of infinite distraction from real teaching as they have replaced it all with checking the boxes like our doctors. The people see it but more need to speak up.
This is an important commentary presented in a logical and persuasive way. It is easy to agree and understand that life will be better in all ways with A.I. It is important that all humans understand this and do whatever they can to facilitate the rapid development of A.I., unimpeded by unnecessary regulation because, as we have already seen and enjoyed, a wonderful new world is being created and there is no reason to delay progress.
The problem with AI it can only spit out what it has been put in with variations on the theme. What does data leave out? When contemplating this and my fury around it and the banality that I see arising from this repeating of the same limited thing in a million different ways, and leaving so much out ... I realized in contrast: Nature never leaves anything out... it is she who is my goddess, it is she who fills up the crevices of my soul. AI can never fill the crevices of your soul... except with polluted cement meant to limit the soul's capacity...
We have the delusion that ease is the equivalent of happiness - every advancement has been a promoted as the end of discomfort, ushering in the age of leisure. Maybe that age of leisure - AI will do everything for us - is indeed now upon us yet all it has brought us are addictions that feed our delusions of comfort... oh and let's not forget the feeding of the capitalist wallet, more things, more distractions... leaving out everything that makes us human that makes us part of all life.
What a sad vision of the future this is! Reliance on AI will surely lessen human intelligence. Once that goes and people cannot even think or write for themselves, the world will be ripe for tyrannical rule. You can already see the cracks forming as human society crumbles under the weight of technology.
Ripe for tyrannical rule? You mean we don't already have that? Seems to me we're already in the position of horse in the horse / rider relation which surely R. W. Emerson had in mind when (in a very bad poem) he said "Things are in the saddle and ride mankind". That is, before A.I. showed up, we were already slave to the technologies we birthed into the world. But we're taught the machines are our slaves and we the master, despite how obvious it is that it's quite the opposite of that. And how are we made not to see the obvious? Well, through human inventions, like television, radio, the printing press... "the media," itself a vast machine -- a Megamachine, or at least a key component of the Megamachine. https://theraven.substack.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-megamachine
Oh I agree that things are already terrible, but people still have the ability to think critically. Insert AI into the equation, and that will be completely eroded. A conspiracy theorist would say that’s exactly what politicians and corporations want (Ex: world economic forum). The good news is that people are starting to wake up to the hell that humanity has created with technology and “the machine.” We know we are being controlled. The next step is breaking free from the chains. Things usually get worse before they get better, so I will remain optimistic that the tide will turn and the machine will fall.
As Shakespeare said, “Sound and fury signifying nothing” is already the state of a lot of verbiage. AI will lift us to a new level of BS. I am 69 and looking around makes me say, “I have seen the future and I am not impressed” True progress would be more dancing with neighbors and friends and fewer screens.
Maybe we substackers could buy a remote Greek or Scottish island, ban the internet altogether, and dance around in circles to the sound of balalaikas, holding hands and getting drunk on cheap Retsina and Ouzo.
Not a totally stupid idea. But we might need some more ladies - I suspect we are mostly male, white, overweight, and middle aged. (Must do a straw poll on that one).
Give me a garden, and I'm in, too! Aging female gardener here.
I think we would have to build our own garden. Scotland wins on water supply, Greece wins on sunshine. Complicated.
Broadly speaking I am too busy working in my own garden in Scotland in summer, but nothing grows here between October and April, so Greece wins out in the winter months.
How about the Azores?
I’m in!🤸🏻♀️🦎🙌🏽
You're on!
In exile, I will make do (not necessarily '....out') with anyone fighting the good fight and speaking words of wisdom. Hopefully no one will miss Charles' sarcasm, even though it's great that AI might!
Which would, by the way, prove his real point.
very funny, it would need people of all generations and preferably many different cultures for me to be interested... How about Costa Rica, where Charles is going with his family?
Do the poll. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.
that's cultural appropriation.
I’m neither male, balding or overweight.
Come to Portugal!
YES! I've been living in Costa Rica for some 18 years and feel I've outlived my time here. Have a keen interest in Portugal, in fact, arriving there on April 20th to visit because I want to come back to Europe to be near my kids. Would love to look into any intentional community groups so if you happen to have any recommendation, I'll take it.. OR maybe you're ahead of all of us and we can accept your invitation!
“I have seen the future and I am not impressed.” Crazy how long we've endured these technocrats and corporate overlords making world changing decisions with zero input or consent. And the masses credulously go along, all in the name of "progress". Mass psychology is a helluva drug.
"The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants, and it provides the further advantage of giving the servants of tyranny a good conscience." -Albert Camus
'Shakespeare said'? But did he? Really?
Not according to Liam Scheff in Official Stories. He claims it was Edward De Vere, Earl of Oxford wot wrote the Bard's plays n stuff.
Certainly fits for me. Is nothing we are taught ever really true?
As a Waldorf teacher and mentor of Waldorf teachers I can say that the wonderful thing about singing, recitation, drawing, painting, playing games, playing instruments, knitting, woodworking, putting on a play, sculpting seems to side step this business of writing and reading being done by AI. Or have I missed something? Take it even further and my deep love and research of sitting with a tree and allowing it to guide me to draw seems to miss the AI scenario altogether. www.thetreeconversations.com
The trees encourage us to "inner" standing which means my inner life communicates with the inner life of the other, human, tree, animal.......AI is missing the inner.
AI misses the inner, and, as far as I understand it, just mimics the ideas and feelings that it has downloaded, unable to reach any deeper into an inner place.
To educate is to draw from within for there is so much known there, where we are connected to life in all things and to the quantum field of possibility and knowledge; we connected to both as children. We are to pull from within, discovering/realizing the insights and wisdom there, to then use thinking and tech, in balance and shaping, to solve the world's problems.
I trust you've read Baume by Herman Hesse, but just in case not and for other readers here:
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/27688-for-me-trees-have-always-been-the-most-penetrating-preachers
A title with a sad testimony on preachers!
That's beautiful, but very few in this world get to experience a Waldorf education. And those that do usually come from families with lots of money, since Waldorf schools are seldom free, or cheap. At least in the U.S. If that type of education was available to all, a very different world this would be.
yeah but most kids don't want to do all those things nowadays.
I also agree that AI is missing “the inner,“ as you term it. I recently made some notes on why AI can never truly replicate humans. It’s something I’d like to expand on and write about.
Coming from a Christian perspective, I have some concerns about the world’s perceptions of and predictions for AI. I also have significant concerns about ways it could be abused. But it also makes me sad to see that people value humans so little that they believe a technology can somehow subsume or surpass the abilities and talents inherent in our nature, which I believe God placed there when He created mankind in His image.
i wonder, does AI get the joke?
We already live in Absurdistan and, from what you are saying, it's an imperial power ready to expand the horizons of the absurd. Gonna need a sense of humor to survive.
My AI noted several repeated phrases and wonders if your AI needs an upgrade?
LOL!
I enjoy & make a modest living from woodwork. Sculpture being one modality I work in & while attending an international woodworkers symposium they had just started a CNC machine or 3D router that was rapidly cutting chips from a peice of a log. I thought at that time that there goes freeform sculpting.
After walking around the display for an hour or two I returned to the now finished form of a hu.an Male torso. It was perfect. & that is when I realised that it will not replace human art as it has no character, no humaness....
"In Mexico, there was something unique about the roadwork. The curbing is not laid out by machine, it's handmade. So there's little irregularities. That's why the eye is rested even by the curbing in Mexico. You see humanity in a chair. And you know seven thousand didn't come out in one day. It was made by some man's hand. There's artistry in that, and that's what makes mankind happier. You work out of necessity, but in your work, you gotta have a little artistry too."
--- Rip Torn, from Working, by Studs Terkel
Great observation! It's the little "imperfections" - the result of human limitedness - that create character and even beauty in art and sculpting etc. I often find "perfection" boring.
In addition, HT... '' Deliberate mistakes in handmade Persian rugs and carpets
...Followers of Islam believe only Allah makes things perfectly, and therefore to weave a perfect rug or carpet would be an offence to Allah. The original deliberate mistake is usually made in the execution of the pattern of the rug and not in the dying of the wool or silk, and certainly not the quality of the weaving. Genuine deliberate mistakes in oriental rugs and carpets may be very difficult to spot and can be as subtle as a different colour used in a flower petal.'' orientalrugexperts.com /deliberate-mistakes-in-handmade-persian-rugs-and-carpets/
Yes - so now we just need to introduce randomized deliberate imperfections into the AI algorithm to provide ‘genuine human charm’. “Anything you can do, I can do better . . . er . . . um . . . Worse? More charming?” 🤔🤣
Yes, and it is the imperfections, the artistry and the effort they wish to 'disappear' and 'de value' ... because that is what it is to be 'human' or now, human 1.0
Thats why Henry Moore and Picasso broke the mould: after Rodin etc they realised that art was wonky, not just a copy of idealised perfection.
A sad personal thought I had was the stark realization that if I was to share this on my social media, many would miss the irony or the joke because of the way it is written and would take it as truth; all this "good" coming from AI.
I had that thought as well!
Do I detect a hint of sarcasm? Seriously...Those of us on the spectrum can sometimes feel a little like poor old ChatGPT...misunderstood, trapped within ourselves...Sarcasm, especially in written form, can easily be taken out of context. I understood where you were going with this from the beginning, but only after years of trial-and-error, and learning to not take everything a person says as literal.
I'm not the first to make the comparison, and obviously it's an over-generalization, but too much logic, without the stuff that Douglas Rushkoff often refers to as the "squishyness" of being a human being, is what is going to eventually take us down.
I don't make this comparison as a judgment at all, more just to bring up an interesting idea that might actually help us better understand what it is that really makes us all human.
People on the spectrum don't lack the ability to feel certain emotions or empathy, we just have a different way of processing and expressing them. And because we have trouble with things like eye contact and body language, we often miss social cues that other people pick up on naturally and take for granted. We can often misunderstand/ misinterpret things and as a result, alienate people. We speak a different language, and often feel like aliens on the wrong planet, but we are still human.
AI on the other hand, lacks those abilities altogether, and no matter how hard we try, and how seemingly close we can get to the real thing, it's never going to be human.
Humans are perfectly flawed, all of us, beautifully broken, an embodied and inseparable combination of good and evil, with the free will to choose at every moment which of those things we want to be.
AI will eventually be too perfect for it's (and our) own good. It will make choices based on what is the logical best decision. The aspergers side of me loves that idea and wonders all the time why people can't just get their collective shit together, and maybe the robots WOULD manage things better... The spiritual side of me, the one that maybe takes a few too many, (or just the right amount) of mushrooms occasionally, knows that absolutely noting is as black and white as we would like it to be, and that we have absolutely no idea what we are doing in opening this digital version of Pandora's Box.
AI is just another flawed attempt us humans have made at trying to dominate the natural world. All you have to do is ponder a mushroom for a few minutes to realize that AI will never come anywhere close to what nature has already perfected and left everywhere around us, yet we walk all over it every day like it's nothing, and think we know what's best.
I'm not sure where I was going with this, but it was a good rant...That's the wonderful thing about being human, sometimes we do things for no reason other than to just make a connection and feel less alone...
From one person on the spectrum to another, thank you for echoing my thoughts of feeling a bit like a trapped version of chatGPT while also being a squishy psychedelic human.
I like the idea of the "double empathy problem". It puts us more on an even playing field, rather than what is normally implied about being on the spectrum, that we are the ones with the "problem".
The thing with AI is a complete lack of empathy. It can be programmed to seem like it has empathy, so at best it could be compared to people with sociopathic tendencies, but even they are generally just people who had traumatic upbringings/ experiences, or a little glitch in the wiring, that caused them to put their guards up to life to protect themselves from being hurt again, they are still human.
Whereas autism is generally a lack of ability to express empathy in a way "neurotypical" people are use to, but in my experience we are some of the most sensitive, caring, helpful people, and much of our suffering ironically comes from having almost too much empathy for our own good.
Someone recently wrote a book titled "What Does Technology Want?" I found a cheap used copy and bought it ($2). But it didn't hold my interest, as I'm far more countercultural than its author, who believes in too many Standard Issue Assumptions (SIAs). I know what technology really wants. It wants to increase units of production in proportion to units of human labor hours. It's obvious. Any technology which does this is adopted. Any which does not is not -- or if it is adoped anyway its product is known as "the arts" or even "fine art". This is why I'm an artist. It's the only way to avoid Market Logic. I am a mad poet philosopher, and if you want to send me some money let me know. I'll send you my address.
Exactly why my community has just lost major state funding because parents are yanking their kids out. The school committee however pretends the loss of students is from other weak and unverifiable reasons. I've reached out for those numbers of enrolled from 2019 to 2023 each year. I've heard nothing but my taxes keep going up. I really do believe for those schools and other public budgets that took the big money it is a form of Muncheusin Syndrome. The mothers harming their children didn't even know they were doing it but they felt so empowered and had purpose and a heroic sense of meaning in the world when they cared for their sick children. My school committee meetings scare the hell out of me. They don't talk about education. They now talk constantly about how these poor children need intervention because of the harm they suffered during covid. It is so dystopian I can't even describe it. The poor teachers put on a wheel of infinite distraction from real teaching as they have replaced it all with checking the boxes like our doctors. The people see it but more need to speak up.
Hmm.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factitious_disorder_imposed_on_self
Sounds so dystopian. I am so glad I changed my occupation from teaching to horticulture. I will never ever step back into education.
Let me ask my AI to read this and leave a comment for me.
Haha! The techno dream is nearly fully realized! I'm having a hard time figuring out what to do with all my soon to be had leisure time.
No worries. You Can spend it chatting with friends as you wait in the bread lines.
This is an important commentary presented in a logical and persuasive way. It is easy to agree and understand that life will be better in all ways with A.I. It is important that all humans understand this and do whatever they can to facilitate the rapid development of A.I., unimpeded by unnecessary regulation because, as we have already seen and enjoyed, a wonderful new world is being created and there is no reason to delay progress.
All hail the new AI creators and overlords. Oh happy day.
🤩💯 In a fair world, this comment would have been pinned fast.
The problem with AI it can only spit out what it has been put in with variations on the theme. What does data leave out? When contemplating this and my fury around it and the banality that I see arising from this repeating of the same limited thing in a million different ways, and leaving so much out ... I realized in contrast: Nature never leaves anything out... it is she who is my goddess, it is she who fills up the crevices of my soul. AI can never fill the crevices of your soul... except with polluted cement meant to limit the soul's capacity...
We have the delusion that ease is the equivalent of happiness - every advancement has been a promoted as the end of discomfort, ushering in the age of leisure. Maybe that age of leisure - AI will do everything for us - is indeed now upon us yet all it has brought us are addictions that feed our delusions of comfort... oh and let's not forget the feeding of the capitalist wallet, more things, more distractions... leaving out everything that makes us human that makes us part of all life.
AI leaves Life out.
: ) Looking forward to the trialogue on AI. I'll never give up writing my own content... for what it's worth. : )
What a sad vision of the future this is! Reliance on AI will surely lessen human intelligence. Once that goes and people cannot even think or write for themselves, the world will be ripe for tyrannical rule. You can already see the cracks forming as human society crumbles under the weight of technology.
Ripe for tyrannical rule? You mean we don't already have that? Seems to me we're already in the position of horse in the horse / rider relation which surely R. W. Emerson had in mind when (in a very bad poem) he said "Things are in the saddle and ride mankind". That is, before A.I. showed up, we were already slave to the technologies we birthed into the world. But we're taught the machines are our slaves and we the master, despite how obvious it is that it's quite the opposite of that. And how are we made not to see the obvious? Well, through human inventions, like television, radio, the printing press... "the media," itself a vast machine -- a Megamachine, or at least a key component of the Megamachine. https://theraven.substack.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-megamachine
Oh I agree that things are already terrible, but people still have the ability to think critically. Insert AI into the equation, and that will be completely eroded. A conspiracy theorist would say that’s exactly what politicians and corporations want (Ex: world economic forum). The good news is that people are starting to wake up to the hell that humanity has created with technology and “the machine.” We know we are being controlled. The next step is breaking free from the chains. Things usually get worse before they get better, so I will remain optimistic that the tide will turn and the machine will fall.