Why AI will struggle to replace us - in our own eyes - Matt Heath

OPINION

The general consensus in 2024 is that artificial intelligence (AI) is coming for us, and there is nothing we can do to stop it. It’s only a matter of time before there is no use for us.

However, at a Pink concert at Eden Park on Friday, I spotted a glimmer of hope for humanity.

If you want to make yourself simultaneously amazed and terrified, take a look at the advancements OpenAI’s Sora has made in the last year. Sora is a text-to-video AI model that generates realistic video scenes from text instructions.

When asked 12 months ago, it generated a distorted Will Smith trying to eat pasta that would never pass for being real. Now, it can generate from a simple text prompt a photo-realistic woman walking down a street in the rain that could be the opening shot of a big-budget movie. But as good as it is now, the really scary thing is how much better it will be in another year - and then another. If I were in the stock video industry, I would be very concerned considering this tech is available to the public.

When robots become better at us than everything, will there be anything meaningful left for us to do at all? Photo / 123rf

In fact, a lot of people are concerned about AI. A recent study of US workers who were somewhat familiar with AI found 71 per cent were very worried about its effect on their employment.

But it’s not just our jobs that AI is threatening. When robots become better at us than everything, will there be anything meaningful left for us to do at all?

In the late 1970s, Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan, the man who came up with the concepts of the “global village” and the notion “the medium is the message”, created a principle called the “tetrad of media effects”. It’s a way to examine the impact on society of any technology/medium by asking four questions:

• What does the medium enhance?
• What does the medium make obsolete?
• What does the medium retrieve that had been obsolesced earlier?
• What does the medium reverse or flip into when pushed to extremes?

A simple example of how this plays out is the mobile phone. It enhanced communication by making it possible wherever we are. It made landlines obsolete. It brought back direct communication that was under threat from mass media like TV, but as it developed, it reversed its original purposes by pushing people to text and digital communication.

Pink performs at Eden Park on March 8, 2023. Photo / Carson Bluck

On Friday, I attended the Pink concert at Eden Park. The bars and restaurants of Morningside, Kingsland and Mount Eden buzzed with activity. The stadium looked beautiful as 50,000 fans, many of them dressed in pink, packed the place for two nights in a row. You could feel the personal connection to this woman in the air. She interacted with 50,000 people like they were friends around a table at a bar. The members of her band were all phenomenal musicians. To be that good, they must have sacrificed large parts of their lives to focus on perfecting their craft.

At the end of the show, Pink was strapped to a spider harness and pulled up into the air 25m above the park, where she flew over the stadium at high speed - dropping right down to the crowd, then flying off again as she sang about a break-up with her husband. The most breathtaking finale to a concert I have ever seen. The skill, core strength, hard work and pure guts it must take to pull off air acrobatics like that impressed me and everyone else there. The fact she had written so many songs the people below connected to on a personal level made it all the more meaningful. People were weeping openly. It was touching, and scary too. I was worried for her safety.

When it comes to AI, the first two questions in McLuhan’s tetrad are easy to answer. What it enhances and what it makes obsolete are quantifiable. What it brings back and what it flips may just be our saviour. As more aspects of our lives become inhuman, we might see a resurgence in our appreciation of real, authentic human achievement and connection. Human-made, face-to-face, live performance. We may start to value ourselves more. Standing in the south stand of our national stadium with 50,000 of my fellow New Zealanders watching this unfold, it struck me that AI will struggle to replace us — in our own eyes. Because you could get a robot swooping around suspended on ropes, but would we care?

If the ropes broke and Pink fell, her family, the thousands there together to celebrate her and the millions of humans she has connected with would be heartbroken; if a robot fell, we would only care about those it landed on.