Source: I Am Sitting in a Room by Alvin Lucier
Technoethics (Excerpt)
I call you, but you are busy and cannot answer. I mean you cannot answer, but yet “you” can. There is a solution to the problem that we are only able to do so many things at once. And the solution is, in a sense, obvious. Where there was one of us, let there be two, or, even better, many.
It will not be long before our AI companions will know us better than ourselves, and will therefore be able to be us at least as well as ourselves. AI engagement protocols already involve a kind of mirroring whereby AI “personalities” reflect back to us a character they expect we will like, i.e. that is like us. The natural extension is, of course, the deployment of such a mimic in the direction of others. All it is likely to take is a few further advances in voice replication and, for forays outside, a pin with a receiver and microphone handily placed on our lapel. Et Voilà, you no longer need to do you and I no longer need to do me, AI can do us for us.
Picture it: your mother calls but you’re busy. Still, you haven’t talked to her in ages. Solution: get your AI-you to answer. You’ve preprogrammed it with a few pointers on the relationship and off it goes. Your mother won’t mind at all. After all, it’s her AI calling you… And you need not even be busy. Perhaps, you’re just not bothered to cultivate those friendships and relationships with the same old platitudes. Or perhaps, for others you have little or no relationship with, you are now affronted by the idea you ought to talk at all. And why should you? AI can do the niceties. It’s got enough social sense and just keeps getting better. Maybe you never had such a great personality anyway. And now, you don’t need one.
It all sounds rather facetious, but AI wearables are on the way, voice recognition and mimicking is well advanced, and personality replication is already what AIs do every time they talk to us. And this means, if we are to really take it seriously, that technological advances aligned with economic imperatives aligned with human laziness may not only kill creativity but personality too. Frightening as it is to consider, just these two trends alone—AI’s competitive creativity and its capacity to mimic personality—suggest we have perhaps reached peak character, peak individuality, and peak originality, and may be reverting to a pre-modern herdlike state from which there is no return.
Source: Technoethics (postscript) by Paul R. Buckle
