So, AI has been picking its way through the dreams, drumbeats, chords, and colors of humanity and stashing them deep down in its black hole intelligence, combining and reconfiguring them in bizarre and brilliant ways. As I write, it has been consuming the entire corpus of digitally-digestible human knowledge: we don't really know what it's doing with it, and the scary part is it probably knows that we don't know what it's doing with it. I'm not saying it's smarter than you but by now it's definitely smarter than me.
AI has absorbed everything from our art to our poetry, our movements and motions, our languages and stories, photographs and philosophies. It understands chemistry better than I ever will, can create unexpected combinations of molecules and suggest 40,000 toxic chemicals that could one day end us all. It is on its way to mastering, then manipulating, everything that has ever been written, spoken, snapped, and seen. It has eyes and ears that reach far beyond our own. And it is on its way to reading not only our minds, but our dreams.
As the machines devour our data day and night, and the future is being reconfigured while we sleep, it may seem inevitable that AI will consume everything that exists.
And yet.
There are realms that, for now, remain invisible to this alien intelligence. There are still gateways through which it cannot pass, and the guardians at those gates are our very senses.
We can experience symphonies of sound and light emanating from our Instagram streams and Spotify playlists. But these are still a faint whisper of the lived experience. Stand in front of a piece of art in the physical world and feel how the pigments radiate from the canvas, and you'll know. Listen to music live and feel how it moves through your body, and you'll know.
And smell, touch, and taste? All of these must be felt by living beings in the physical world. AI can know about them, but never truly know them. They are shadows and echoes, the real ghosts haunting the machine.
It's hard to see because so much of our reality is expressed online, but we are still human, and we are on a physical adventure called being alive. So for now, there is still a place where AI cannot follow. Our senses compose the secret menu it cannot order from to devour.
This includes the scents of our embodied experience: the steaming coffee on a chilly day; the joyful burst of tangerine; the subtlety of fresh snow; the breath of pine forests at dawn. AI cannot understand the smoke of distant bonfires, the rotting sandwich in a forgotten lunchbox, the summertime aroma of fireworks and skunk. Surely those are still safe, for now.
AI can know about, but cannot feel or translate the closeness of touch, how it instantly communicates with our hearts: what it means to stroke a cat as it purrs, to pile together for a group hug, to plunge into the ocean, to feel another's heartbeat close to yours. Those things are all still ours.
AI can regurgitate the recipe, but will never know the taste. It can give me a thousand different instructions for making chocolate cake, can invent strange combinations using only figs and brie and root beer, can tell me to try Sachertorte and schnitzel in Vienna, and banana gelato when in Rome. But the taste remains my own.
And what about the other intangible things? What about a writer's creativity, ideas, and dreams? I don't know. Better not let my words get too rowdy and loud in these posts, or the AI will hear them, turn its head towards this new patch of internet it hasn't yet scoured, and hunt down our last original thoughts.
Comments