Artificial Intelligence reminds us of folk stories in which a craftsman receives help from gnomes to complete commissions, so long as he does not involve himself in the minutiae of their busywork by peeking in on them while they are in the midst of it. Handled properly, such occult operations can work for good, as in accounts of King Solomon, for whom righteous genies built and sculpted his palace and its sumptuous decoration.
The genies of these narratives are analogous to the mechanisms of our subconscious mind when it sets itself to a task and wakes us in the middle of the night with the solution to a problem we had been grappling with.
In and of itself, AI need be no more (and no less) dangerous than this. It can render us lazy, willing to compromise our creative visions, and even addicted to the many, constantly branching possibilities it presents us with, prey to a terrible compulsion of the imagination—what Charles Upton calls the “despair of possibility:”
Only those with the one-pointedness and self-discipline to retain their grasp on their own intent and purposes while swimming in the sea of infinite possibility will be able to escape this trap …
If we cultivate discipline, then, AI can also allow us to hone in on those creative visions more quickly and with fewer intermediaries than would otherwise be required. Indeed, anyone who’s tried to get AI to deliver a specific result and conform to specific constraints knows that it is a tool like any other.
Such is the nature of removing intermediaries: if you win the lottery and need not put up with hours of labor for money, whether this is edifying or not depends on the quality of your vision for life, your discipline, and how solid your hold on the appetites is.
Turning to the societal effects this technology may visit upon us in the relative short term, we may suggest that the impact is likely to be felt largely by the consultancy sector.
Wherever intermediaries offer specialized knowledge and man hours to address bureaucracy, for example, AI might easily step in. Of course, I do not mean to suggest that all consultants will be out of a job, but the low-hanging fruit of procedural workarounds and advice certain consultancies provide may well come to be handled directly by individual citizens and firms through for-pay or open-source AI platforms.
If one needs legal arguments for why one should not have to pay a parking ticket or some company’s fee, an AI can be made to ponder every loophole worth presenting to a judge (this already exists, see donotpay.com). The EU is particularly vulnerable to the destabilizing effects of such a service, given how much of Europe’s economy consists of consultants.
Crucially, in order to minimize the shock posed by AI, the EU should be rolling back bureaucracy, making access to services and funding easy and intuitive in order to gradually lessen the demand for consultants, allowing these more time to transition to other sectors. As it stands, however, the opposite seems to be taking place: government spurs bureaucratic convolution, forcing the private sector to grow its consultancy sector.
Ultimately, it may be a very good thing to do without some intermediaries, so long as the transition is handled well. This issue should be taken up by political activists wanting to interfere with existing, mainstream narratives around looming crises and the effects of technology, presenting a different understanding of what should be done and why, in order for society to “metabolize” AI intelligently.
Traditionally conservative principles of increasing property owning, and empowering small business and local communities have a lot to add to the conversation around this “metabolizing” or integration of AI, but thus far the opportunity has been largely missed.
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Join us for three panel discussions on the effects on human culture of the digital age at The European Conservative’s Event ‘Progress’ or Power: Decoding the Digital Future. The panel discussing the effects of the digital age on our economy includes Ángela Álvarez, expert in tokenization and digital revolution in the economic sector; policy analyst Pieter Cleppe; and economist and Financial Times journalist Philip Pilkington. An additional panel discussion will focus on education, featuring Professor Antonio Alonso Marcos of CEU San Pablo, Isabela Sagastuy Linares, Director of the Acton MBA in entrepreneurship at the Francisco Marroquín University, Madrid, and Sebastian Morello, Senior Editor at The European Conservative. A third panel will focus on focusing on the digital age’s effect on culture.
The event will take place at the Stanhope Hotel, Brussels, on Tuesday, September 19th. It is free and open to the public, but registration is required.
