News Brief | AI and the decline of human agency

||| FROM POPULATION BALANCE |||

AI, under the dangerous control of tech oligarchs, is creating a world with shrinking human choice, creativity, and connection.

• How tech journalism emphasizes novelty and business profits and amplifies tech companies’ hype as journalists seek to maintain access to powerful tech leaders;

• How profit-driven AI exploits a human bias toward fast, easy thinking and decision-making that leads us to outsource our choices and judgment to automated systems;

• Why AI large language models are like cover bands providing the ‘greatest hits’ of humanity’s past achievement – an ‘artificial hive mind’ that is biased toward middle-of-the-road, derivative, and unoriginal ideas;

• How impersonal, unaccountable, ‘black box’ AI decision-making creates Kafka-esque systems in government services, jobs, and loans – disproportionately harming the least powerful in society;

• Why AI large language models are 2 to 3 times more biased than the average person across various cultural and demographic dimensions;

• How AI will increase addiction and social isolation, replacing real-world relationships with flattering, always available chatbot ‘friends’;

• Why our collective sense-making and democratic decision-making will be further threatened by AI – creating even more tightly sealed, individually customized information bubbles that conform to our feelings, not the truth;

• How many tech oligarchs pushing AI are also involved in genetic engineering projects with the aim of breeding ‘optimized’ babies;

• Why tech companies’ legal liability and U.S. states’ AI regulations are hopeful avenues of AI pushback;

• Why we need to rediscover the value of restraint and realize that not all innovation is beneficial for humanity and the planet.