While innovators are building a new and potentially superior intelligence in their own image, who is looking out for our well-being? Unfortunately, even those leaders and policymakers who believe they have our best interests in mind rarely have the knowledge, power, and capacity to deliver. And, from a practical basis, most are required to reach a consensus; the time this takes almost guarantees not only that they miss the target, but that the target they are aiming at is no longer even there. In most democracies, the stark reality is as follows:
• Those who make the decisions need to be re-elected — meaning popularity is frequently more important than action.
• As elected officials are often not around to see the results of their inaction (or actions), they need not fear being held accountable.
Our leaders’ seeming inability (or unwillingness) to look out for us is partially our own fault. The general public increasingly demands binary, yes/no answers, and instant results. Our governments (and media) look to deliver just that. Yet most issues are immensely complex and nuanced and often extend over timeframes that exceed their times in office. Yet by abdicating their responsibility to engage in what is really going on, our leaders are simply allowing technologies and their creators to become increasingly powerful and appear more than willing to just wait and see where the chips fall.
Humans’ historical ability to be flexible in processes and use diverse information sources is narrowing, becoming more unequivocal and dogmatic. In some ways, this can be linked to computerization— when we enter a search or program, we expect a result. And whereas Google provides a list of suggestions, ChatGPT now gives us a single answer. While humans tend to be analog in our thinking and have historically incorporated different viewpoints and accepted multiple outcomes, computers have been only digital— designed only to recognize and process ones and zeros. It is indeed ironic, as humans appear to move toward binary thinking, computers, with quantum methods and their ability to handle and accept multiple states simultaneously, may be moving toward the analog.
One result of our move from analog to binary thinking is the clear polarization we are seeing in many countries around the world. If we consider some of the more complex and challenging subjects of today —climate change, gender and race equality, the impacts of the global COVID-19 pandemic, etc.— we demand more and more definitive answers to questions that cannot be answered definitively without a blithe willingness to ignore evidence that does not fit the outcomes we want. This results in governments, the media, and other information sources deciding that unambiguous mistruths are better and more valued than the actual truth, which is often more nuanced and problematic. This hinders much discourse needed to deliver real answers to the real problems.
This trend must be challenged. The first step is to acknowledge that data is neither uniquely the solution nor the problem; it is a complicated combination of both.
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