Sci-Fi movies are now the reality, we have Boston Dynamics clambering gracefully over obstacles and backflipping to show off his success, we have self-landing rockets and autonomous marine vehicles to clean the oceans, we now have Chat GPT to write our emails, essays, coursework, love letters and eulogies, and we even have AI to turn our words into an image. The AI Apocalypse seems imminent.
Now many people are starting to feel pressured. Seeds of doubt are sowing amongst creative communities. Rumours are spreading about people losing their jobs, and feelings of inadequacy are surfacing – when faced with competition from AI that can write grammatically perfect essays in 10 seconds.
Artists that can take weeks or months to perfect their pieces are pushed aside in favour of computer generated pieces generated by word prompts.
The creative mind – already doubtful and self-deprecating – sees these threats and assumes the worst. Why would a company hire a human with all their flaws, emotionality, and challenges to manage, when they could hire an AI to do 100x the workload for a fraction of the price?
It seems logical that a company would choose the bottom line and wipe out half their workforce. SEO team disbanded, graphic design tablets left to gather dust, copywriters served their written notice and only coders left, smug that they made the right career choice.
But does it have to be this way? No.
Does AI have to beat humans in everything? No.
Humans are human. We are irrational, illogical, driven by desires sometimes unbeknownst to us, we can fall in love, have tantrums, we can create from pain or happiness. We can find the grey where a computer only sees black and white. We fend our way through life, dipping our toes into different experiences, trying, falling, failing, getting up.
We can find beauty in chaos and chaos in beauty.
We can have everything in the world and be miserable and have nothing and be happy.
We will always be better than AI at being human. It is our human traits, our human consciousness our interactions with other humans, our communication styles, our creativity, abstract thinking and emotions that we must heighten and tune in order to compete and differentiate ourselves from our AI brethren.
AI may be able to analyse big data and draw conclusions, but its data pool has limitations.
Humans have millions of years of evolution programmed into each of our cells and generational wisdom passed down from time immemorial.
Have no fear, this is not the end.
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