How to Survive an AI Apocalypse – Part 6: Cultural Demise

PREVIOUS: How to Survive an AI Apocalypse – Part 5: Job Elimination

We are already familiar with the negative consequences of smart phones… text neck, higher stress and anxiety levels, addiction, social isolation, interrupts, reduce attention span, loss of family connections…

AI can lead to further cultural demise – loss of traditional skills, erosion of privacy, reduced human interaction, economic disparity. AI pioneer Jaron Lanier warns of forms of insanity developing – dehumanization due to social media, loss of personal agency, feedback loops that lead to obsession, and algorithms that result in behavior modification such as narrowing of perspective due to filtered news.

We are also seeing the erosion of human relationships as people find more comfort in communicating with chatbots, like Replika (“The AI Companion Who Cares”) that are perfectly tuned toward your desires rather than other humans with messy and inconsistent values. Excessive interactions with such interactive agents has already been shown to lead to reduced interpersonal skills, lack of empathy, escapism, and unreal relationship expectations.

OK, where does the Demise of Human Culture fit in our growing panoply of AI-Run-Amok scenarios?

I put it right above Job Elimination, because not only is it already underway, it is probably further along than job elimination. 

The good news is that you are almost completely in control of how much cultural degradation AI can have on your own life.

Here are some very practical behavior and lifestyle patterns that can keep cultural demise at bay, at least for yourself:

• Turn off, throw out, or, at least, reduce reliance on those NLP-based devices that are listening to you – Siri, Alexa, etc. Look things up for yourself, ask your partner what recent movies might be good to watch, set your own timers. This forces you to maintain research skills and just a little bit more interpersonal interaction.
• Do a Digital Detox once in a while. Maybe every Tuesday, you don’t leave your personal phone anywhere near you. Or start smaller even, like “the phone is shut off during lunch.” Ramp up the detox if it feels good.
• Read real books. Not that there is anything wrong with Kindle. But the books are tactile, have a feel and a smell, and take up valuable visual space on your bookshelves. They are easier to leaf through (who was this character again?) and, certainly, both real books and ebooks are a huge improvement over the attention-span sucking tidbits that are so easily consumed like crack on the phone.
• Make your own art. Buy art that other human made. Don’t buy AI-generated movies, books, music, artworks – help the demand side of the supply/demand equation keep the value up for human-generated content.
• Get out in nature. We are still a long way from an AI’s ability to generate the experience that nature gives us. I once took my step-children out on a nature walk (they were like, “why, what’s the point?”) and we sat on a bench and did something radical. Five minutes, nobody says a word, try to silence the voice in your head, don’t think about anything in the past or the future, don’t think about anything at all, just observe. In the end we each shared what we felt and saw. Not saying it changed their lives, but they got the point, and really appreciated the experience. It’s deep – the connection with nature, it’s primitive, and it is eroding fast.
• Spend time with humans. More family, more friends, more strangers even. Less social media, less games. Exercise that communication and empathy muscle.
• Make decisions based on instinct and experience and not on what some blog tells you to do.
• Meditate. That puts you in touch with a reality so much deeper and real than our apparent waking reality, that it is that much further removed from the cyber world.
• Be mindful. Pay attention to your activities and decisions and ask yourself “is this going to contribute to the erosion of my humanity?” If the answer is yes, it doesn’t mean it’s wrong, it’s just that you are more aware.

OK, next up, the nightmare scenario that you’ve all been waiting for: ELIMINATION! SkyNet, Hal 9000, The Borg.

NEXT: How to Survive an AI Apocalypse – Part 7: Elimination