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I had written a post entitled The Intent Deficit but as I was doing wider reading the nature of the post changed (I still have the draft of the original) from “we need to have intent with how we use tools” to “what is the meaning of life”. And it’s this article in Rolling Stone that triggered the change.

I pivoted to “what is the meaning of life” because there are existential challenges that we face as a species. We are at a crossroads in our evolution. We have the ability to create life, but we also have the ability to destroy ourselves.

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Where did it go wrong?

Humans have always been searching for purpose. It’s why religion exists. It’s also why particle physics exists.

Back in the good old days (at least 20 years ago), life was simpler. You could find purpose through religion and community, or at the bottom of a bottle or drugs, or through war. And the internet was still a child.

And then along comes Richard Dawkins. I’m not going to put the blame on him. But he did influence a large group of odious young people to parrot the paraphrased line of “God is made up, you’re an idiot if you believe in it”. Now these young people gave up on God and convinced others to do the same, but what they couldn’t do is abandon their search for purpose.

It is a big and lonely universe if we’re the only planet that supports intelligent life. Maybe it’s a statistical anomaly or maybe it’s a miracle? I’m not the proselytising type, so you’ll have to find that out for yourself.

Anyway, back to purpose. If God is dead, what fills the void? Enter the internet.

The internet is a strange place. On the surface it is a vast repository of human knowledge. Scratch the surface and it holds all the weird and wonderful stuff that we, as humans, believe. Some of this is mainstream, like religion, and other bits are so fringe it can be frightening to anyone with a gram of rational thought.

When people search for meaning they may encounter religion, the wellness industry, the likes of Andrew Tate, the dark recesses of the internet, or Generative AI.

GenAI, which is taking the world by storm, is trained on the internet. It knows the dark recesses of human thought and imagination. So when people turn to it in search of meaning, they’re going to be exposed to this more easily than if they had trawled through the message boards themselves.

I posit the idea that GenAI is a mirror that reflects the person asking questions. If you’re going to use it to search for meaning, then expect yourself to be shown back to you (in a distorted way that only GenAI can do).

I did ask both ChatGPT and Claude what the meaning of life is and they both gave such bland responses that it wasn’t even of comedic value. But hey, mirrors.

What happened to critical thinking?

Critical thought is often a healthy dose of scepticism about what information you’re being presented with and scrutinising why you’re being presented with the information. In recent years, coupled with the explosion of the internet, these skills (and they are skills that need to be practiced) have become overwhelmed and eroded by the slop that exists on the internet. This preceded the age of AI but there’s a strong chance that this is being amplified by GenAI. And the use of GenAI is contributing to the slop.

If we are to look into the mirror and the mirror tells us that we’re the fairest of them all, we’ve got to ask ourselves the following questions:

• Why me?
• How many others has it told them the same?
• How does this differ from my lived experience?

But if we are so devoid of purpose, then we will latch on to anything that tells us we’re special.

GenAI, ultimately, is the application of statistics to a problem. It’s looking at the probability that y follows x. It doesn’t have critical thinking because it’s not alive, it doesn’t have a soul. It can mimic something that may appear to be critical thinking but it’s just responding to additional prompts and refined probabilities. If you do not understand this, then you are at risk of being led down a path that is not your own. Even if you are aware of this, you may still be led down a path that is not your own.

What is our purpose?

Each and every one of us will have a different purpose - but it can be condensed as “to be better”.

AI can help us with being better, if we use it with intent (cautious about injecting “right” before “intent” - as that’s a can of subjectivity I’m not ready to open). It is, currently, a tool. Just like a stick is a tool. Or a car is a tool.

AI can also make us worse (as we are seeing). It can be used to manipulate, to deceive, to bullshit. It can destroy senses of reality. It can destroy creativity and ingenuity.

Remember Coca-Cola’s 2024 Christmas ad? It was created using GenAI. It felt off. The “creativity” was in the prompts but it lacked empathy. Empathy is what makes Christmas adverts great. Empathy is also what separates life from machines.

Because it is a tool - the fault is not with the tool itself but with the person who wields it.

What is my purpose?

I use GitHub Co-Pilot a lot as a tool to make me a more productive developer (not a better one, that needs deeper understanding than only I can learn not what can be conveyed by AI). I use the conversational aspects of GenAI to provide a different, more accessible interface to data beyond SQL, reports, and Excel. I also use it to help form the ideas I have in my head into something that is more coherent. I have used it to write some blog posts (not this one) - you’ll be able to tell which ones because they lack “authenticity”.

I was an early adopter and I saw the benefit to me as an individual. I have been more productive using it. And I’m now chasing that productivity high. This, I am well aware, is a fallacy.

What is my purpose? I like to think of myself as a lazy gardener, but I’m still figuring out what my purpose is. I’m trying to be a better person, a better husband and parent, a better friend. I’m trying to connect more with nature and the physical and metaphysical world around me.

What is the purpose of AI?

To understand the purpose of AI, we need to understand the purpose of its creators (as well as its users). The creators are human - whatever they build will inherit their flaws and philosophical beliefs. The creators are also trying to make a profit (of which they are doing an AMAZING job).

I think Sam Altman’s purpose, rightly or wrongly, is to create artificial life. The risk with artificial life, as fascinated as I am by it, is that we collectively turn our backs on pursuing our individual purpose in exchange for the easy ride and, in so doing, sacrifice what makes us human. All those random thoughts, the creativity, the messiness of life, the imperfections that make us human. We are not perfect beings. We are not machines. We are not gods. We are human beings.

The purpose of AI cannot be universally defined or applied. We each have our own opinions - from staunch advocates to hardcore sceptics. But we do need to move with intent, regardless of AI, toward a future that is better for us as a whole. We have spent far too long in being passive with our future and this has led to less desirable qualities (insert your own take) filling the void and creating a society which is fundamentally broken.

Not all doom and gloom

What is broken can be fixed and made more beautiful as a result. Our destiny is in our hands. We can create a positive future for ourselves and, potentially, incorporate utopian views on AI without making ourselves obsolete. But we need to do it together. So, what future do we want?