Intelligence is the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills, with artificial intelligence being the theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages. Where algorithmic is something expressed as or using an algorithm or computational procedure, and entropy being a lack of order or predictability; gradual decline into disorder. Bringing us to an intersection I see as algorithmic intelligence entropy, which I feel best describes the intersection humanity is at right now when it comes to the collision of humans and artificial intelligence.
I regularly say that APIs are about reducing our lives to transactions. Often meaningless soulless transactions that do not benefit us in any way. I feel like in this process we often forget who we were and lose meaningful bits of ourselves in the disruptive shuffle. I don’t think we want artificial intelligence. I don’t think we’ve fully realized and maximized natural human intelligence equitably. Even as a (recovering) believer of Internet technology, I don’t think we collectively want artificial intelligence. I think that business leadership wants it to help improve their bottom lines, and we are so used to being told what to do by these people, that somehow we buy into the narrative of AI. It all leaves me believing this is all just a process for making things less predictable, where disorder is just the normal mode of existence.
I personally have witnessed that there is more money to be made within disorder. We are programmed by capitalism to believe business is efficient. It just is. It is a fact. When in reality, it is often not. There is a lot of money to be made in the cracks of inefficiency, bureaucracy, and corruption. I am unsure why we want to continue obscuring our worlds with artificial intelligence—well, I am not being genuine—I do know. There is a lot of money to be made in the shadows of artificial intelligence, just like there is a lot of money to be made in the cracks of mobile devices. Consumerism and capitalism thrive when our very human lives are reduced to a transaction, and when our daily lives aren’t ground in an increasing web of distortion, disinformation, and noise, we are more easily manipulated, exploited, and transacted without us often even being aware.
Whether it is at the local or global level, I think the future digital experience will be fraught with at a minimum, noise, but more commonly it will be disruptive distortion that will almost seem normal. The way people eat up the fear peddled in mainstream media, believe in Trump and QAnon, will be quaint historic examples of what is just business and politics as usual. We’ll accept AI hallucinations as just a cost of doing business and living in this new AI obfuscated and algorithmically automated world. It’s like the dangers and environmental impact of automobiles-—algorithmic intelligence entropy will engulf us and devolve over time so naturally, that we will deem it the new normal. It will be the new shared experience, that we lost as we began losing community, or at least a shared television programming experience with personalized devices connected to a distributed and distorted experience.
Algorithmic intelligence entropy is just part of the experience now. It is all computational. Your experience is boolean, and you either choose digital, or you choose to be human. If you consciously or unconsciously choose to be digital, your lived experience will be shaped by algorithmic intelligence, but also the entropy introduced via the tailpipe of your AI powered existence. It will be like carbon monoxide poisoning that makes you sleep, and consumes you entropically over time. I see this as the slow build towards the singularity. There is no literal uploading yourself to the web or plugging yourself into the matrix, but you will check out of the shared human experience. Your real human parts will be distorted, disrupted, and fragmented into an incoherent set of daily, weekly, monthly, and annual patterns that are defined by the machine. You won’t know the difference. You will think you are happy despite never quite being. You won’t be able to remember what is missing, and algorithmic intelligence entropy will become the fluid surrounding your existence.
