JOSHUA TAN

I posed to myself a question a while ago about whether we should sometimes apologise for being hard-nosed. At that time, I supposed there must be a subtle art to letting things slide. Now I think we ought to pity passionate people more, those imprisoned by their impatience. People speak of golden years. Those golden eras where great people weave their stories, retold again in needle and threaded tapestries held proudly high for all to see. For a generation that went from brickphones to smartphones in the blink of an eye, it would be tragic to now surrender so much society to AI. In today’s day and age, it would seem that many of us have high hopes for change. Change for the sake of change is on the lips of young people everywhere. Yet no matter what changes, nothing ever seems enough. So let’s see how we can change things. 

Our broken jumper of a world is old, full of holes and itchy. Even worse, over eight billion people are trying to wear it at the same time. Dreamers are ignorant enough to believe they can patch it, and passionate enough to pick an itch to scratch. But as we all know, this is never an easy task. Not just amongst the UNSW crowds teaming with engineering students, but for crying out loud, cooks compete. Many, without a doubt, must wrestle their ideas through rigorous refinement and inevitably rejection too. This process does perhaps produce great progress; but it’s also a huge pain in the ass. I think the most restless people amongst us are those who have dreams, a world they want to see. A wish they want fulfilled. The most passionate amongst us decide to pursue this dream with restless persistence. 

A needle fixes nothing without the first thread that follows behind it. Perhaps you haven’t thought about things like this, but one person cannot change the way people think. Then what impedes the needle’s point is in fact the narrow focus of its eye. Allies it seems, prevent passionate figures from putting problems before people. Yes maybe that’s you, dear reader, who might help a poor dreamer toe the fine line between a sense of purpose and stubbornness. The problems we have in this world reflect the people who populate our planet. The ones that get fixed and the ones that go unfixed are decided by persuasion, and sometimes pure power. Police usually take the latter option off the table, but perhaps I might be speaking with a future president. So let’s not get ahead of ourselves and take a moment to appreciate the people problem. 

Just as a needle and thread are each in their own way intertwined, the stories we tell each other sink more strands into our woven world. It is a human need to tell stories, and AI is changing the way we do this. Answering at every step of change how to motivate others is to answer how we can successfully tell the important stories and dream the important visions. It is inevitable that AI will learn how to make friends and influence people, just as phones do. In some ways this has always been how the internet works, but chatbots are now taking this process out of the background and thrusting it into the forefront of the lives of our family and friends. People are turning to AI for social support in a society that fails to provide for our most basic needs. What we still aren’t asking ourselves is whether we should surrender ourselves and our sanity to an unaccountable black box algorithm. 

I watch around me as dreamers like needles, drive deeper. Many more fall farther into despair. Each and every one of us has skin in this game. Today’s problems need new solutions, and perhaps old fixes need fresh patches. It is now that we must decide to dream new dreams to solve old problems. Billions use generative AI, yet control still stays in the hands of vanishingly few. AI is designed to solve an optimisation problem. Its goal is to minimise the difference between predicted and actual text, or stories too. Humans must not stop telling stories, because to do so would be to benefit the few that control the narrative. The cost to each of us would be to watch as every dream dies. So what story do you have to tell?