By Tenma Bonifacio
Take this entire article with a grain of salt. Treat it as if it were fiction. Act towards it with skepticism, and not as a telltale sign of the coming future. For in truth, I am not a fortune teller or a time traveller. I am without visions, but I do have childish imaginations that get me curious. This curiosity has led me to imagine the future as if I were world-building it out from a novel. The research I have done and will use in this piece is bare minimal. I rely on what I already know, and as such, my understanding will be flawed. At the end of the day, this world I’ve envisioned is nothing more than one man’s bias.
We’ve all seen movies warning of the dangers of Artificial Intelligence. Usually, most go self-aware and begin the machinations that lead to our death or extinction, with the commonality between all these movies being that they see humankind as a threat to ourselves. The entire Terminator franchise, Deus Ex Machina, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Matrix - to some extent, even Wall-E. However, this doesn’t mean that the world is on an express highway to crash and burn. Of course, there are works of fiction that are more hopeful. Something like Star Trek, with its science fiction world, bordering close to fantasy sometimes, has characters like Data who co-exist with their natural flesh and bone colleagues. But in most cases, movies that feature conflict between man and machine always seem to start with man rejecting the machine. This plot line showcases our ability to reach so far and become sophisticated, but too craven to keep moving forward - we unravel the stepping stones we thought to be solid structures holding us up, revealing society to be a weak structure, and we fall down into our own artificial tragedy. Skynet in Terminator saw humans as destructive creatures, and decided the world would be better off without us. In the Animatrix anthology of The Matrix, we saw a future where Artificial Intelligence robots would be targeted by highly radicalized humans - and when all robots left to build their own capital and begin building trade relations with the human population, humanity tried to destroy them again, to which they retaliated in full force. Again, these are feature films, works of fiction; they shouldn’t be treated as real. However, I can’t help but treat them as possible when our world is slowly becoming what we saw on-screen.
Everything starts out with a joke. That joke is passed around and becomes a core idea. That core idea becomes a belief. Words like “clanker" start out as a word used by clones as a derogatory term towards their droid enemies in the Star Wars television show The Clone Wars. Now, it becomes a joke that describes generative AI or advanced robotics. It wouldn’t be a surprise if in the future, it cements itself as a derogatory term not in fiction but in reality.
Some sort of robots or AI will be taking our jobs, and humanity is acting like this is the first time it has happened. I am in no way advocating for the loss of human occupations to machines; however, I am stating that even if there were jobs lost, humanity shouldn’t lose sight of our most important characteristic as a species, and that is our adaptability. When highly mechanized factories came around during the Industrial Revolution, it was no different - automating industries to become more efficient. Skilled workers fought against such a change, which devalued their work. But in the end, new jobs and skills were created, and skilled workers offered their on-hand services, which are typically more highly valued then the factory-made crafts.
In terms of politics, AI is highly valued as a financial venture that rakes in a lot of money. If AI can automate many menial tasks, this could affect labour, computing, analytical jobs, as well as warfare. After all, humanity's passion to develop itself has always been for the primary focus of making hard tasks easier and less consequential to the person. In the military, it’s always been the dream to have soldiers and armaments that can follow orders and die for the country. In the future, robotics may become refined enough to allow this to happen without the sentimental value of losing a life in the line of duty.
A future that I see is a world of automated, augmented, and highly mechanized warfare. A future that I see is streets clamouring with unemployed people who have failed to adapt in a society developing too fast for them to catch up, a society that is leaving them behind. A future that I see is humans who’ve immersed themselves too deeply in this new technology, forming a bond considered heretical and unnatural. Should this tumultuous transition to becoming an even more highly advanced futuristic civilization succeed, a future that I see is open to interpretation as either a utopia or dystopia, a human race that has mastered its identity and capability alongside technology. Should we trip and fall during this transition, larger conflicts, internal tearing of the fabric of society, even apocalyptic events - all such tragedies may await. A future that I see, therefore, is a world that is divided between skeptics attached to the grim reality, opposing the dreamers from reaching the golden gates of utopia.