The Matrix Sucks!

In these times where algortithms rule and articles rise and fall according to the whims of machines, everyone knows that it pays to have a clickbait title. But few perhaps realize just why that is or how increasingly automated the world that makes this necessary really is. In the movie The Matrix, the virtual world created by a super-intelligent artificial intelligence (AI) is depicted as sleek and stylish. In our world, where increasing numbers of people live most of their lives online, the internet they inhabit is increasingly a product of AI. Unfortunately it sucks.

It’s no longer controversial to observe that a sizable part of the population of the developed world is spending an inordinate amount of their waking lives online. We are addicts. For some of us that’s been true since the days of dail-up modems and message boards. What has changed in recent years is that we’re no longer just communicating through the machine. Increasingly we are communicating to the machine.

Analysis by cloud security firm Barracuda Networks concludes that less than 40 percent of internet traffic is human. The majority of traffic is fake. Some of it, about 25 percent, is what you could call benign overhead—search engine bots and such. But more and more, near 39 percent, is scams, malware bots and spam. This comports with what’s called Dead Internet Theory.

But the real fear, as expressed in so many sci-fi stories and films, is just the opposite. What if the internet is not dead at all, but a conscious entity, and perhaps even a malevolent one? A lot of what we call the “dead internet” is content generated by that subject of both hype and panic: AI.

Sadly, one aspect of AI may, sort of, live up to both the fear and the fantasy it generates. It is what we might call, quite literally, the killer app. Warfare is shaped by paradigm shifts in technology, so just as massed artillery, machine guns, and barbed wire shaped World War I trench warfare, World War II was defined by mature tank and armed vehicle design and deployment, so have drones shaped the current conflict in Ukraine.

As nearly every make and model of infantry fighting vehiclehas been tried, and failed in Ukraine, the dominant weapon system, aside from the once and future king of every battlefield, artillery, has been drones. And the tech supporting drones has been advancing by leaps and bounds, as tech often does on the anvil of war. Cheap mass-produced drones follow soldiers into bunkers and dugouts. The newer Lancets and Switchblades already have a primal AI swarming capability.

So far so bad, right? And we haven’t even touched on the impact on the economy and society in general. So cue dystopia to enter stage left. And we would, but for one thing: AI, for good and for ill it turns out, isn’t really that intelligent.

Current AI systems like ChatGPT and the Chinese disruptor DeepSeek tell us less about these machines than they do about the human condition. The present versions of AI are claimed to possess an IQ equivalent between 83-90. Undoubtedly AI has an ability to learn, but it arguably lacks the ability for true creativity and innovation. Then again, that describes a large number of human beings as well.

Since the advent of the industrial revolution the mechanization of labor has almost exclusively replaced manual labor, aside from special cases like the original, mainly female, “computers” of the Manhattan and Apollo programs, who were rendered obsolete by the calculator. This devaluation of physical labor, and the relative immunity of white collar jobs from obsolescence, culminated in the contempt expressed by journalists toward laid off auto and coal mining workers with the phrase, “Learn to code!” Well, now the shoe might be on the other foot.

The low-hanging fruit of automating manual labor has long been picked. The manual labor that remains is a different story. For now, anyway, it’s difficult to replace your plumber with a robot. But the code is learning to do many white collar tasks, even, dare one say, most of what passes today for journalism.

The redundancies will start at the bottom, for example, at the call center. All those “Bobs” and “Janes from Florida, with suspiciously Indian accents, will be replaced by AIs using voice technology that actually wouldn’t sound out of place in Dade County, perhaps even for the scam calls. And from there it will eat its way up the corporate ladder, devouring departments of people who thought they were doing “intellectual” work, only to find out they were replaceable parts of a Rube Goldberg machine, quite easily boiled down to a database of automated responses.

Could AI really become intelligent? In the end it’s still bound to the inputs; and we’ve seen no indication of it being able to perform paradigm shifts. So I’d wager the answer would be “No,” as any so-called intelligence it is deemed to have would always be based on the same old false assumptions. I would speculate intelligence itself is an emergent phenomenon of seemingly simple mechanisms in irreducibly complex patterns, which is why I have no faith in true AI being constructed any time soon, or “solved” by CPU horsepower.

Is AI dangerous? Yes, but only in the sense that the industrial revolution has always been dangerous. It makes everything the same and makes a hell of a lot more of it. We had passed through the mass production of things. Now we’ll have mass production of thoughts.

This brings us to the reason Artificial Intelligence will have an economic impact, despite not actually being intelligent. Bots will merely replace what we might call “bio-bots.” That is, AI will not be replacing human geniuses, or even merely talented people, but it very well may replace human “NPCs” with actual NPCs.

AI can’t replace real talent, but can mass produce mediocrity—those who do no more than go by the book had better watch out as they can be turned into machine code. The future isn’t content farm serfs plagiarizing the past, but machines boiling the commonest of denominators down to stock phrases.

A saying attributed to Stalin is, “Quantity has a quality all its own.” As a society and culture we’re in the process of testing that thesis to the breaking point. Yes, AI is still just data in, data out. The problem, of course, is this is also true of a great many flesh and blood people. It’s the core of the NPC meme, which wouldn’t have taken off, as it did, without a kernel of truth.

How high up the ladder, what office floor do you reach before the tasks involved are truly dependent on innovative thinking, creativity, and human talent the machine can’t distill into IF-THENs and replicate?

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