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Doesn’t AI make life much more convenient?
It's so easy
AI, and indeed other digital technologies, offer us speed, efficiency or greater convenience by allowing, for example, our face to be scanned to pay for our meal instead of fumbling for our wallet and extracting a card or cash.
Augmented reality offers us the chance to try something at home, without the in- convenience of visiting a shop only to find the item isn’t in stock
Digital assistants like Alexa or Siri avoid us having to type on a keyboard, reach for the remote control or get up from our couch to turn the lights down.
Unforseen costs
Whilst there is nothing wrong with convenience per se, we need to consider the unforeseen costs. Children are becoming less empathetic, less willing to engage in one on one relationships and can develop stereotypical expectations from the behaviour of such assistants and robots.
Loosing control
The cost of convenience is often giving up a little bit of what it means to be human, less time with real people and more online. This results in a gradual dumbing down of the image of God in us as we lose more and more of those skills and attributes that define us as humans.
We’ll notice that the lure of digital technology and AI in particular, far from giving us more control over our technological world, ends up distracting and controlling us.
Exploiting our vulnerabilities
While the technology may offer convenience, it has been designed thus and to create addiction for the purpose not of making one’s life easier but of driving profits. One might argue, ‘What’s wrong with that? Don’t all products in a free market work in that way?’ We buy something because it offers us a benefit, and naturally the company that sold it to us profits. The distinction here is that some products, some technologies, appear to do that, but are by their design exploiting our vulnerabilities, influencing us as individuals and as a society in ways that are diminishing what it means to be human. A bread toaster is convenient and useful in the kitchen, but it hardly affects what it means to be a human being, except when we burn our fingers trying to extract the toast!