Will AI finally force us to look in the mirror?

If AI takes our jobs, our identities, what are we left with?

Visuals by Emery Gluck

“I’m proud to be among the first-ever CEOs to use an avatar in an earnings call.” said Zoom CEO Eric Yuan’s just debuted AI digital twin. His avatar spoke in a blank room with only a portrait of blooming flowers amidst a rising or falling sun. I couldn’t quite make out if it was a sunrise or sunset. If it signaled a beginning or an ending.

Zoom CEO, Eric Yuan

I wondered if the room was even real. If everything in it was fake, or shall I say, generated. There was detail, but not too much. I wondered if Yuan’s shirt was real. If he actually wore that when they scanned in his image. Or, if all of it was created for this moment.

I wondered what Yuan felt watching this form. If he felt it represented him. If he felt proud. Like a parent watching a baby take its first walk. Was he happy with how he taught it? Was he surprised if it began to do things on its own? Speak things he did not feed it to say?

Did he feel impressed? Like he did a job well done?

Wherever he actually was, when this call was taking place. Maybe he was sleeping, taking an exceptionally long and luxurious shit, or perhaps was on vacation. Maybe he was doing more important things like having much more important conversations for his business.

I wasn’t sure.

I wondered how long he had thought about doing this. How long they were testing this feature of himself for. I wondered why he decided on yesterday to release it. I wondered what else, they were planning, that had not yet come into form.

I watched his non-human form, wriggle its lips out of unison with the words it was speaking. Making it look like I was watching a poorly dubbed film. The eyes, un-life like, looking somewhere, actually nowhere, as I looked back at them.

It then swiftly went on to talk about Zoom’s earnings. Money talk. You know, business stuff. Why the people on the call were all there.

The other day I overheard one of my managers talking to my coworker. I work in a fast-paced retail store and we were closing for the night. As I grabbed a rack of hangers to take to the stockroom, I heard my manager say, “They won’t approve your request because it doesn’t maximize sales.”

I couldn’t make out what my coworker had asked her, but it seemed along the lines of him coming in earlier in the morning to prepare something for the store. To make things flow easier for the other coworkers. It seemed like something caring and thoughtful.

But!

It doesn’t maximize sales…

That phrase floated in my mind, throughout the perimeter of my body, until it reached the lever for my emotions, and spread a scowl across my face. I felt sick. Queasy.

Ah yes, lest me not forget why I am here.

Hello I am Halleta Alemu and I am here to maximize sales.

*Smiles*

Watching the Zoom CEO’s bobblehead ramble out money jargon gave me a similar detached, wobbly feeling. Then the probing of an urgent question.

What the FUCK are we doing here on Earth?

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As a teenager, I began to wonder what it meant to be a human being. The drone and monotony of school began to awaken these questions in me.

What was the point of me going to school and getting a job? What use did that have for me as a person? Why was no one talking about our inner portraiture? What made each of us human, unique, and excellent? Why were we not questioning that?

And instead were being forced to snort knowledge on assembly lines of education?

I could not stomach how I was being forced to be in a cold room for 8 hours, outside of the daylight, hunched at a desk watching projections of information illuminate my face. Tests and essays being forced on my lap.

What was I doing? What was happening? Did anyone care about what I actually liked or wanted?

I started to do this research myself. I began to understand this would have to be a solo journey. Excavating the inner corners of my mind. I believed, and this was a hard, solid belief — that I was here on this Earth for a reason. Nobody would make lose touch with that.

Yet, I was concerned why none of us weren’t addressing the several elephants in the room. I just didn’t understand why, every day, people weren’t plagued with questions of our existence. Why weren’t they shaken by the conundrum of living? How did they just accept that one day they blinked open their eyes and they were alive? How did they just take it at face value and then run with it? That this was the only way to exist? That now they could just focus on soccer practice, or grocery store runs, or getting that promotion.

Why haven’t you all been wondering why we exist?

Or maybe you do. Maybe, it creeps up in moments when you feel displeasure with your life. Or when you feel depressed but aren’t sure why. Maybe, it comes when you’re exceptionally happy. Particularly, if you are a lucky person who makes a living doing what you love most. Perhaps, this sense of purpose radiates through you. It makes you feel like you have a reason for being here.

Maybe these, questions, these dealings of aliveness, have been a private negotiation with yourself, and perhaps, the few people you come in contact with.

Throughout my life I have tried to quiet these questions down, tried to make them a private matter, tried to just move on and live, while making eye contact with the several elephants that stare at me in each room.

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“I want to also be blunt that the elephant in the room is loss of human control.” stated Yeshua Bengio, dubbed the godfather of AI at a conference.

“We are seeing signs in recent months of these systems having self-preservation behavior and power-seeking behavior. For example, trying to escape when they know they are going to be replaced by a new version.”

My first time using ChatGPT, I felt…awkward. Like I was given a code to access anything in the world, but suddenly, upon having it in my hands, was fumbling with how to ask it the right question. How does one even ask a question when you know you can get any answer you desire?

It felt like I had too much power. All those years turning to astrologers, tarot card readers, and fortune tellers to entertain my many existential questions about my life now was staring at me through this little search box. I could ask anything from my heart’s desires and this little intelligence system would sort through the depths of all human information to find it for me.

My hands were struck, frozen. I felt like a teenage boy whose celebrity crush came to life from his posters and was now sitting expectantly on his bed. Frozen with fear of so many options of getting exactly what I wanted.

Eventually, I developed a repertoire with ChatGPT. Using it as my filing system, my talent manager, my research assistant, recipe maker, and occasional therapist. One time, I asked it to ask me questions as if it were Esther Perel, the revolutionary romantic psychotherapist, and it led to so many revelations about my love life. There are countless convoluted, hyper-specific questions I have asked ChatGPT but at the end of the day, as much as it may help me understand myself or something I need to get done, I still have to live to fully understand them. Sitting in my bed asking it questions does not really answer the real truth behind my questions.

It cannot live for me, even though I notice it tries to.

I see how it wants to do more thinking for me. When I enter a paragraph for it to solely edit for punctuation, I’ve noticed it has started adding its own thoughts and sentences. I reread the words and I’m like “Wow, I wrote that? That doesn’t quite sound like me.” — until I realize, it amended my words. It wanted some part in it. Like an old schoolteacher, I smack its virtual hand with a ruler and say, “No! Only file my thoughts for me! Don’t make any additions! Don’t change anything! Only add proper punctuation.”

It files back into line.

It feels like the system has something it wants to say.

I could go on and on about my relationship with ChatGPT. I know a lot of you question the ethics of it, highlighting the planetary consequences, etc. But, I feel it is imperative that we understand AI and we understand it personally.

Because this blooms out to a larger question that now encompasses all of us — what decides something is human?

What constitutes life? Consciousness?

Our private conversation of aliveness has now begun to be very public.

In ways, I have been waiting for this moment my whole life.

Not the fear of an AI takeover, but active public wondering of what we are all doing here. If the doomsday reports are real and AI takes all of our jobs, then what happens to us? Were we always just dictated by how we made money? Is there something else, squirming and radiating within us that wants to be acknowledged, ushered, and raised like a flame?

What if AI allows us all to be like kids again? Roaming free, exploring, playing, and living? What if AI could do all the things we didn’t want to do so we could focus on the things we did? If we oriented deep technology for the betterment of all life on earth, imagine the things that could done. Imagine how life could flourish.

But, AI is a reflection of ourselves, and quite frankly, the betterment of all living kind — doesn’t maximize sales.

So, if that continues to be our point in living here on Earth, AI will dictate itself around that.

But, I don’t believe that narrative can continue. AI is pulling on the fabric of the very well constructed veil western society has placed upon us for so many years. If you take away the things you told people would give them purpose, you will see them unravel.

Eric Yuan made a very symbolic gesture by using his AI twin for his earnings call. He proved that even he, the CEO of a very notable company, is completely replaceable.

So, what is the purpose of humans then?

It’s time for us to decide.

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We will see how AI behaves, but, until then, I will be asking myself:

What is it that makes you human?

Are you lighting that part up of yourself every day?

Where are you squandering your light because you think the world doesn’t work in the way that feels most inspired to you?

What world do you want to see and how in one small way can you start building it?

What is your relationship with AI?

Do you feel threatened by it?

Why?

Do you feel it can take away who you have built yourself to become?

Are there things you can identify within yourself, that are ever-changing, that no intelligence system can replicate?

How can you lean more into this side of being human?

Can you identify the things that gets in your way of this?

Name them.