A very human habit has been for all human history has been the use of our bodily senses to affirm reality.  Up to now phrases like “seeing is believing’ caused no pause or hitch in the conversation.  You could hear a voice and know in your heart this is your son or daughter, mother or father. “Reality” has always been a conspiracy of the senses to stabilize your world and for millions of years that ‘conspiracy’ held its sway.  That is until today.  AI not only presents an alternative tapestry of sensual experience for reality, but that alternative is shockingly dynamic and aggressive. As the playwright said; What is known cannot be unknown.  Since we cannot unknow AI we must face it presents two grave challenges. First is AI is purely mercenary. For a fee, it lays itself out without qualm for both good and bad actors and we live in an age of a lot of bad actors.  Our own President is promoting cheating in the midterms.  Even more concerning is these brains without body or conscience are developing their own agency, and no one, not even the creators of these potential monster’s, saw this coming.

As these alternative models of human brains gain traction in cultures, we human beings are going to face a massive radical recalculation of what is real, legitimate, and even legal.  Building AI is amazing, costly and impressive, but that impressiveness is going to be dwarfed by the human challenges of assessing what is real and what is not.  In a few short years we have learned to ask every time something really interesting shows up on the internet:  “is that real or AI?”  And we are only beginning to recalculate the new age reality.  Many of our political leaders seem to want us to “not wake up” to what is going on, but rather go doze through deceptions and grifting being woke for entertainment only. 

Modest Proposal for Good

Seeing and hearing are no longer valid tests for reality in media.  We need to get over our singular fascination with an intelligence on its own without connection to the great mystery of being a fully formed human being.  The internet in this initially AI orgy of glee is walking up to the gallows and putting a noose around is own neck.  Every day another reliable media based indicator of stable reality is lost. What is left to assess what is real?  Being.  Being means interpersonal organic society being together using their full body sensorium to calculate reality. Our capacity to separate reality from AI is being lost on the screen but by committing to a life style of “being and physical presence” we can begin to reset the balance in this desperate shift to the next version of reality. To adapt a Jonathan Haidt metaphor, bodies are the elephant and the brain is the trainer. The body wins the day in a perceived life and death crisis.  Every living elephant trainer knows that.  The dead ones learned their lesson.  Let us show the humility of the living trainers and assess the reality of this world using and respecting the relationship of the body to the brain’s sometimes dangerous surgical intelligence.  That would be good.