New technologies make our lives easier, but at what cost?

Ever since the industrial revolution – or even since the invention of the wheel! – we have been outsourcing familiar tasks to new technologies. In our modern age of convenience and automation, we can buy complete meals in the supermarkets, summon a taxi with the touch of a button or use an app to hire anyone from a plumber or an electrician to a dog walker or a therapist.

What’s more, we are standing now on the precipice of an even easier and more automated future – one replete with driverless cars, self-cleaning homes and AI assistants who can draft our emails, plan out our days and even do our jobs. History shows us that even if these changes can be disruptive in the short-term, they improve living standards and quality of life in the long-term – but is there a line that can be crossed?

At FairLoc, one of our ambitions is to create more dialogue about what happens when we entrust technology with the jobs we have long since done for ourselves. Especially jobs in the creative and cognitive industries that call for a bit of wit, warmth and an understanding of the human condition. What will happen to us as AI begins to take on more and more of these tasks? We explore this question below.


The tides of change

In Spain, a hugely popular television show reached its end in November 2023. Cuéntame cómo pasó (Tell Me How It Happened) was the story of Spain’s recent history through the lens of a single family. In its first season, set in 1968, one of the recurring jokes is the reaction of the family’s grandmother to all of the new mod-cons available in their fledgling consumer society. After vowing never to watch the TV before it enters the home, she soon becomes addicted. Sceptical of the washing machine at first, she is soon proclaiming with quasi-religious fervour that it has revolutionised their lives. From the first family car to the hallowed sowing machine, the joke repeats to the delight of audiences from another age.

And indeed, watching from our perspective today, it is outright hilarious to think that anyone could ever have mistrusted these staples of modern life. Even harder to understand is how we ever could have lived without them – and all the inventions that have come since, from dishwashers to tumble dryers and smartphones to the microwave. Simply put, our lives today are anchored by machines and technologies that relieve us of hard manual labour and tedious, time-consuming tasks.

But at the same time, it seems that many of us also carry around a sense of what we’ve lost over the years. Despite technology taking jobs off our hands, our lives have nonetheless grown busier, and we have come increasingly to rely on conveniences that can help us out. As a result, simple skills like knowing how to mend a shirt, fix a leak or even cook a meal have been lost by many of us. This can sometimes leave us feeling disconnected from our heritage or traditions, and in times of inflation and financial hardship, it can leave us feeling lost, unsure or backed into a corner.


What happens when we outsource creativity?

The march of technological development has not abated, and today we are witnessing the onset of some major advances in the world of AI. This technology appears to promise a world in which we are not only able to outsource manual labour to automated systems, but even cognitive and creative tasks. Since the launch of ChatGPT, we have seen this technology used to write reports, websites and blog posts. It has been integrated into online platforms like EventBrite and used to power AI teachers and companion chat bots, shaking up a wide range of industries from copywriting and translation to education and marketing.

But what will happen to us when we start offloading these kinds of cognitive tasks? Will our abilities to write, read, analyse information and to engage in problem-solving go the way of the old manual tasks we never do anymore? Could there be a risk that we might become complacent and lazy – that our brains might grow lethargic from lack of exercise, to the point that they are no longer able to perform these routine tasks? And what would that mean for our daily lives, our sense of purpose and even our identities as thinking, productive and creative beings? It seems the deeper we dig into this quandary, the more questions we uncover!


Different schools of thought

So far, there are different schools of thought on what the future might hold. Some writers have considered the idea and still believe that allowing AI to take over our cognitive tasks will ultimately be beneficial. Writing in the Guardian, Simon Winchester suggests that by allowing algorithims to purge our worlds of unnecessary information, we will be able to free up more space for creative and inquisitive thought. This could even lead to the emergence of the next great philosophers, he argues.

Meanwhile, Pankaj Chawla argues in Forbes that the impact of AI will be much like that of Google. Upon its launch, there were similar fears that over-reliance on the search engine would lead us to become lazy and unimaginative. The reality, however, was that Google became an important and now essential tool of investigation and discovery, actually boosting our creative capabilities rather than diminishing them.

But even so, there are others who warn that an over-reliance on generative AI may undermine our own capacities over time. Nir Eisikovits, for example, warns that our ability to make judgements may decline the more we entrust AI to make decisions for us. What’s more, AI also threatens to remove serendipity from our lives and could hamper our aptitude for critical thinking. Nate Anglin, meanwhile, warns that AI offers us an easy route around challenging tasks that effectively switches off our imagination and makes it more difficult for us to develop sparks of genius. In short, the worry is that by reaching for the easy AI option before doing some mental legwork of our own, we will undermine our own general intelligence and cognitive skills.


FairLoc and the future

From our current standpoint, there is still a lot we don’t know about how this technology will unfold. But as we ponder these questions and considerations, we can’t help but feel it is worth remembering that language is a human concept. It is not only something that springs organically from the human experience, but also a lens and a filter through which we understand and experience the world. As a tool and our most central mode of expression, it is also tightly linked to our own personal development and sense of self. So it is therefore well worth asking questions about what happens when the language we consume and produce comes not from ourselves but from machines?

Far from wanting to be the sceptical technophobe who shies away from new developments – and like the beloved abuela from our Spanish TV show, who becomes the butt of jokes for future generations – we are keen to embrace new technologies in all shapes and forms. But at the same time, we also want to encourage dialogue about what they will mean and what place they should have in our society. Past changes have altered our lives for better and for worse, and as new technologies encroach into the realm of the human mind, we think it’s well worth wanting to root out the worse. That is one of the reasons FairLoc was created, and together with your help, our ambition is to ensure that AI allows us to continue marching forward instead of stepping back.

So no matter whether you think AI will make us stupider or smarter, slower or faster, better or worse – there is a place for all of us in the conversation, and plenty of good reasons to believe that we should let the humans do the talking! Learn more about how FairLoc works here.