People have basically been turning themselves voluntarily into robots when it came to their social life. Throughout the ages, if you look at how most people dressed, what they talked about, how they behaved in public, and even how they went through their entire lives or who they thought they were, you will see that a lot of it was heavily influenced by some such influencer or rigid cultural norms. Or there were unwritten rules of behavior dictated by the roles people were supposed to play in society. In the old days, the influencers might have been kings or queens or priests. This pattern has actually been around for a long time, it just used to occur a lot more slowly. Needless to say that copying someone diminishes our own sentience. And a successful one in today’s world is one who millions or even billions of people copy regularly. Stated simply, an influencer is basically someone who other people like to copy. We live in an age where “social influencer” is a highly coveted and profitable profession. The most stark example of this is social media. This brings us to the increasing robotization of our social lives. In fact, one might argue that it has become more widespread when you look at other aspects of our lives. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean robotization is in decline overall. Today’s employers understand the value of giving a lot of autonomy to their employees, and one can argue that robotization of workers is on the decline in many workplaces. Of course, it is true that we no longer live in the world of Charlie Chaplin.
We even consider the words “work” and “play” as being opposites of each other, with the understanding that “play” is where one is fully alive and free to be themselves, whereas “work” is where you constrain yourself at least to some extent. We have all read horror stories about working there, such as people having to wear diapers in order to avoid having to take bathroom breaks.Įven in white collar jobs, a big tell is the military style language that is commonly used, such as “marching orders”, “line your ducks”, “firefight”, “fall on the sword”, “all hands on deck”, and so on. This is particularly obvious in blue collar settings, but is true at least to some extent even in the case of the more white collar or creative professions.Ī well documented example is that of the highly automated warehouses of online retailers. Most work regularly requires us to give up at least some of our agency, our personality, and sometimes even our intelligence, and just fall in line like robots, in order to be effective as productive employees. The scene above is obviously exaggerated for comic effect, and one can argue that things have improved in many workplaces since the time of the movie, but the reality is that the work lives of most people in the modern world are still substantially mechanized. The short video excerpt included above captures it well.
Robotization is easiest to understand and is even widely acknowledged, when seen in the context of our workplaces.Ĭharlie Chaplin immortalized this idea in his movie “Modern Times”. We will look at the 4 main spheres of human activity - work, social life, personal life, and even our inner lives, and see how robotization has crept into them.Ĭharlie Chaplin getting “robotized” in “Modern Times” Let us call this process the “Robotization of Humanity”. This issue, as the title suggests, is exactly the opposite of an AI becoming sentient - it is about human beings voluntarily turning themselves into less sentient, less intelligent, and more mechanical beings, i.e., robots. In this post, I am going to talk about an even more important issue that has actually been around for a long time, well before AI ever made its debut. In my previous 3 posts, I went over the background behind this and related developments in AI, my arguments against Lemoine’s claim of sentience, and my belief that we should instead focus on more important issues precipitated by the rapidly developing world of AI. This trilogy with four posts was, as I have already explained in my previous posts, prompted by Google engineer Blake Lemoine’s claim that an AI chatbot had become “sentient” in his opinion.
How can I, a lowly blogger with no name recognition, go against such a well established tradition? So allow me to write the fourth post in my “Sentient AI” series, which I had initially called a trilogy. Douglas Adams perfected it by explicitly calling his Hitchhikers Guide books, which are actually 5 in number, as a trilogy. I believe Asimov was the first one to do that, but I could be mistaken there. It is a tradition, at least among sci-fi writers, of writing a trilogy, and then adding a fourth book to it. Forget “Sentient AI”, Worry About “Robotic Humans” Instead!