Retirement – Smelling the rat

There’s nothing new about spotting fakes. We’ve been doing it forever. Artificial flowers can fool you for a while, but there’s nothing like the scent and colours of the real thing.

Yet counterfeits get sneakier by the day as the Artificial Intelligence (AI) revolution reshapes our lives. Silicon Valley is spending literally trillions of dollars in the race to perfect a super intelligence that will make most of our jobs redundant. It’s a race that has few controls with governments fumbling to keep up. Yoshua Bengio, regarded as the father of AI, says, “ A sandwich has more regulations than AI.”

Even so, there’s not much regulations can do to stop AI distorting the things that make us human, and the dignity and respect for ourselves and each other that goes with that.

It’s subtle stuff we’re talking about, carried in the tone of our voices, the common courtesies of how we talk to and about each other, the personal investment we make in the words we use.

I can cope with automated and impersonal messages when it comes to dental appointments and reminders about unpaid invoices. Google can tell me how to reply to emails with stock phrases like

‘Thank you for letting me know’ and I can choose to ignore the advice. AI usefully gathers good information in milliseconds. The issue is how honestly we use it.

It becomes a moral issue when speakers purport to talk with personal conviction in their own words, but actually rely on AI generated text.

And it happens all the time and everywhere, from speeches in Parliament to community leaders, teachers and local body politicians, talking to you in language that’s clearly not their own. They’ve drawn it down from the Cloud and I don’t mean the heavenly one.

And how do you know? Not by the content, which is usually sensible enough and generalised widely to cover all options. It’s the tone and cadence of their speech, the odd word they wouldn’t normally use, and the pitch they’re making to everyone in general and no one in particular. Your trust in the speaker (or writer) starts to plummet.

And that trust, once lost, is very hard to ever reclaim. A whiff of AI is enough to lose it.

The student who uses AI to pass exams, the politician who relies on it to get elected, the wedding toast, the funeral eulogy. Anyone using AI covertly to pretend to speak personally is harvesting a whirlwind they’ll have to reap one day. It demeans the user and insults the receiver.

We know it takes years of experience – listening, watching and comparing – to discern when someone is speaking the truth in their own words, anchored in their authenticity. Retired people are the experts. They’ve done their 10,000 hours of practice. We can be the canaries in this mine that AI is digging for the world.