Sentences on Sentience

Sri City: “They’re trying to convince people they can’t do the things they’ve been doing easily for years – to write emails, to write a presentation. Your daughter wants you to make up a bedtime story about puppies – to write that for you.” We will get to the point, she says with a grim laugh, “that you will essentially become just a skin bag of organs and bones, nothing else. You won’t know anything and you will be told repeatedly that you can’t do it, which is the opposite of what life has to offer. Capitulating all kinds of decisions like where to go on vacation, what to wear today, who to date, what to eat. People are already doing this. You won’t have to process grief, because you’ll have uploaded photos and voice messages from your mother who just died, and then she can talk to you via AI video call every day. One of the ways it’s going to destroy humans, long before there’s a nuclear disaster, is going to be the emotional hollowing-out of people.”

-Justine Bateman on AI for the ‘Guardian’.. 

A few days back, my mother and I were looking at old pictures that she preserved in dusty, crinkled, laminated albums- some of her childhood, some her teenage. I could see her gently stroking pictures of my grandfather and her 5-year old self. She could recount in vivid detail, the backstory of every picture, even of those she couldn’t find but remembered clicking. As of today, I have 17,512  pictures in my phone gallery. Quite frankly, if my phone gallery reflected any different, let’s suppose 10,000 or 5,000- I’d believe it, because of these 17,512 pictures I don’t remember clicking most. I don’t remember their stories, their photographers or their dates like my mother does. 

Her pictures weren’t ‘candids’ but their smiles and their underlying contexts were. Some in the album were poised, planned poses with their best attire, trying to get the most out of 36 pictures the ‘film’ of their camera would allow. Ironically, most ‘candids’ I see today, are not candid to say the very least. They capture no story, no laughs, no smile lines and wrinkled, creased eyes; the time we could use in witnessing a very moment unfold in any way it could, is neatly allotted to direct the ‘appearance’ of a candid moment, nearly an illusion. Which is funny because that’s what I assumed a phone gallery would do- make it easier for us to capture every little seemingly insignificant moment, so easily so readily, as if stealing a few keepsakes from life just to let its taste linger a little longer, but the abundance and hyperaccessibility of my photo gallery makes me take it for granted instead, hardly ever revisiting those 17,512 pictures.

And perhaps that’s the exact stage of technology we are in- it’s counter-productivity. 

I often wonder, people who got early access to telephones, or got to view the very development of the idea of telephones in the 19th century must carry such hope. The hope to hear the voice of a loved one at the very thought of them instead of craving for their voice for months or years. Once calling became accessible, we introduced text messaging. Now calls go unanswered for days, watching the very death of its ringtone; phones are hijacked with texts that multiply by the minute, and friends & acquaintances have become mere observers of each other. The saving grace though, would be the personalisation of texts- a birthday text to a friend, a paragraph on how their day was spent, or even a confrontational word. Today, ChatGPT offers a ‘Birthday Wishes Assistant’ which is a ‘ specialized tool to create unique, heartfelt, or humorous birthday messages'. It offers ‘personalized, high quality birthday wishes’. Heartfelt, personalised birthday messages to your mother that aren’t written by you. 

Today people are using Chatgpt as a ‘friend’ or a ‘therapist’ given its accessibility especially financially. I am not going to even elaborate the ethical and medical drawbacks of that, which is a conversation of its own. 

“Just last week, I spent a solid hour in an animated back-and-forth with ChatGPT, seeking advice for a personal problem that I'd been agonizing over for weeks. I didn't want to bore my husband and friends with it again.”(excerpts from Business Inside, “The rise of ChatGPT therapy and our constant need for feedback”) 

How far along have we ingrained our escapism, or rather morphism into technology, that we absolutely isolate and abandon the very vulnerabilities that make us human? We are slowly starting to reject these very vulnerabilities that build connection and community. Why did we reject parts of ourselves as a community that verbalise, ‘I am in pain and I need you’? There was certain bravery enshrined in our being that looked people in the eye and called out their name.  Since when did we revert to such staunch hedonism, that our being itself slowly turned into a rejection of all that is uncomfortable and ‘negative’. 

For a year after my grandmother passed away, I was unable to look at her smiling, garlanded picture hanging on the wall. Not because it reminded me of her absence, not because I had forgotten her or missed her any less, but simply because I knew that wide-toothed, shrivelled eye smile was not all she was. My grandmother was a loud woman, who wasn’t hesitant to frown, clench her teeth, cry or furrow her eyebrows in annoyance and irritation. What I miss the most is her unpredictability. I could never anticipate what her reaction to something would be, but make an assumption at best. Turning this assumed definition into a tangible, visual token is easy today with AI tools. With AI "resurrecting" the departed and animating ‘live’ video calls replicating one’s voice, image etc, creating “clones” of individuals is becoming increasingly simpler. The fierce woman I happened to call my grandmother is not one that can be confined and predicted to a screen. The most sacred part of human connection is its ability to be dynamic and unpredictable. As I grow, so does my perspective of my grandmother. No version of AI can capture wrinkles she could have grown and replicate the way her eyes may have squinted. It was our grief that made us human- feeling, empathetic and passionate. Today, we escape into ways that fades grief into a forgotten concept. 

Earlier we could face the weight of words, affection and grief. We could see it, accept it and pen it. We would run the risk of immortalising words in letters and anticipate responses for months. Presently with data leaks, accessibility of private data to Meta and the upcoming Income Tax Bill(which allows governmental access to individual data like emails and social media activity), the old tradition of pen and paper becomes a symbol of resistance. 

The ink used by generations before us echoes a resilience that shields the future. It becomes a testament of human earnesty against human escapism.