In late February, OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, stated that “people talk about how much energy it takes to train an AI model — but it also takes a lot of energy to train a human” amid concerns about the immense water-usage of AI data centres. This defence that so easily equates people to machines, terming our natural processes of eating and drinking for survival as ‘energy uptake’ to ‘train us’, is a horrifyingly dystopian use of language, which he very casually uses. But even more worrying is his following claim that it would be fairer to compare how much energy AI needs to answer a question, versus a human, in which case he claims that “probably AI has caught up on an efficiency-basis”.
While there is a lot to say about how AI aims to make humans redundant, particularly in workspaces, and the threats this will pose for people’s socio-economic security, there is a more important narrative underlying this issue, which allows for humans to be perceived as replaceable in the first place. Namely, our society’s growing obsession with human ‘usefulness’ and ‘efficiency’.
This pervasive idea can be found in political narratives of having to be ‘deserving’ of public welfare, wherein the source of people’s struggles is reduced to their ‘lazy’ character, and in dominant (social) media spaces that promote ‘self-betterment’ through almost military-like health regimens. The message: your value as a human is determined by your productivity. And while this message isn’t inherently malicious, its expectations have become so exhaustingly high and disconnected from reality that it can actually have the opposite effect of discouraging people from wanting to work on their health, passions, and goals in an actually productive way.
Though it might not always be said explicitly, we value and praise people who are capable of reducing their more emotional and complex humanness to clear-cut organisation and goal-attainment, like a machine. Companies appreciate competitive employees who take fewer breaks, complete more work, and distort their work-life balance to do so. As a result, eating healthily and making sure we are getting enough rest — which are both necessary for our well-being — are viewed as secondary and worthy of neglect.
This mentality has normalised highly disconnected perceptions that are fundamentally damaging to human progress, as people become more commonly perceived as a burden for needing resources to live, particularly since we are developing technologies that are more efficient than us. Instead of seeking to reform our societies to help integrate people into them in a healthier and more organic way, we shame and isolate individuals for not being able to compete in an increasingly expensive and cut-throat world.
But this mercilessness does not have to reflect reality. We are simply misunderstanding what human progress is and how to achieve it by sidelining humans themselves, and terming our nature ‘inefficient’. Efficiency isn’t everything: quality progress is achieved through time-consuming research, discussion, and practised creativity, which are crucial and distinctly human abilities.
Photo by Cash Macanaya on Unsplash
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People are Not Machines and That’s Not a Bad Thing
In late February, OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, stated that “people talk about how much energy it takes to train an AI model — but it also takes a lot of energy to train a human” amid concerns about the immense water-usage of AI data centres. This defence that so easily equates people to machines, terming our natural processes of eating and drinking for survival as ‘energy uptake’ to ‘train us’, is a horrifyingly dystopian use of language, which he very casually uses. But even more worrying is his following claim that it would be fairer to compare how much energy AI needs to answer a question, versus a human, in which case he claims that “probably AI has caught up on an efficiency-basis”.
While there is a lot to say about how AI aims to make humans redundant, particularly in workspaces, and the threats this will pose for people’s socio-economic security, there is a more important narrative underlying this issue, which allows for humans to be perceived as replaceable in the first place. Namely, our society’s growing obsession with human ‘usefulness’ and ‘efficiency’.
This pervasive idea can be found in political narratives of having to be ‘deserving’ of public welfare, wherein the source of people’s struggles is reduced to their ‘lazy’ character, and in dominant (social) media spaces that promote ‘self-betterment’ through almost military-like health regimens. The message: your value as a human is determined by your productivity. And while this message isn’t inherently malicious, its expectations have become so exhaustingly high and disconnected from reality that it can actually have the opposite effect of discouraging people from wanting to work on their health, passions, and goals in an actually productive way.
Though it might not always be said explicitly, we value and praise people who are capable of reducing their more emotional and complex humanness to clear-cut organisation and goal-attainment, like a machine. Companies appreciate competitive employees who take fewer breaks, complete more work, and distort their work-life balance to do so. As a result, eating healthily and making sure we are getting enough rest — which are both necessary for our well-being — are viewed as secondary and worthy of neglect.
This mentality has normalised highly disconnected perceptions that are fundamentally damaging to human progress, as people become more commonly perceived as a burden for needing resources to live, particularly since we are developing technologies that are more efficient than us. Instead of seeking to reform our societies to help integrate people into them in a healthier and more organic way, we shame and isolate individuals for not being able to compete in an increasingly expensive and cut-throat world.
But this mercilessness does not have to reflect reality. We are simply misunderstanding what human progress is and how to achieve it by sidelining humans themselves, and terming our nature ‘inefficient’. Efficiency isn’t everything: quality progress is achieved through time-consuming research, discussion, and practised creativity, which are crucial and distinctly human abilities.
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Photo by Cash Macanaya on Unsplash
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