On the edge of now

By Professor Chris Thurman

Doomsday prognostication and dreaming of perpetual progress are both human habits as old as our species’ collective consciousness. Nevertheless, it is perhaps fair to say that The Future has never seemed quite so near. From climate crisis to the rise of Artificial Intelligence, from apocalyptic scenarios to tech-driven utopias, it feels like we live in a present merging with the horizon of what was supposed to be a distant future.

The impact of this phenomenon is generationally marked; unsurprisingly, attitudes towards the future are inflected by different concerns expressed by parents and children. Recent surveys suggest that the majority of parents in countries as varied as South Africa, the United States, Greece and Japan fret about their children’s futures in economic terms –they believe that as adults their children will be worse off financially than they are. This collective pessimism is new. Moreover, it is discernible in countries both in the Global North and in the Global South, cutting across the developed and the developing world.

The children, on the other hand, are preoccupied with merely surviving. A 2021 study by researchers at the University of Bath surveyed 10 000 young people (aged 16-25) in 10 countries, and confirmed that “eco-anxiety” is the primary driver of their fears about the future and a major inhibitor in their daily lives.

My teenage daughter put it succinctly in a conversation with my wife and me that was starting to drift towards that convention of parental reassurance in which you tell your children, “I know what it’s like, I was your age once.” She reminded us: “When you were growing up, nobody told you that you might have to live on another planet because humans trashed Earth.”

Future-minded educators, in trying to prepare children for life in a rapidly changing world (or worlds), regularly inform them that the jobs they will do one day haven’t been invented yet – and that the careers they thought they might pursue will probably no longer exist in a few years’ time. This message may help to inculcate resilience and grit; it may encourage adaptability and the much-vaunted ability to “pivot”. But it can also be a killjoy.

My daughter, who previously harboured ambitions to be an author, has been told that somewhere between the launch of ChatGPT and the advent of GPT-4 the death-knell of human literary creativity was sounded. The dispiriting conclusion of what she has learned about AI text generation is, “There’s no longer any point in wanting to write a book when I’m older.” Worse still, this demotivating effect extends to all aspects of her reading and writing life. The unspoken question here is: If an act of human connection is at the heart of the meaning we get from books and other literary texts, but in the near future that will no longer be the case, then what’s the point of reading for pleasure at all?

There’s a wider (and potentially profound) discussion to be had here about the inadequate binary of Human versus Robot. If ChatGPT and GPT-4 work by scouring the internet as a vast repository of human knowledge and then compiling human-like responses to human prompts, is that still “machine learning”? Isn’t this just AI learning to recognise and imitate human consciousness – producing a much, much faster and more efficient version of what our limited brains can do? And if AI in the form of GPT-5 or -6 no longer requires prompting, but starts producing its own questions and giving expression to what we might call a creative impulse, is that fundamentally different to a human using language to wrestle with being?

Such a consciousness would be more than code, more even than a self-aware machine; an entity with this level of intelligence, the argument goes, would merit the protection of certain basic rights. Humanist scholars – in the Sciences and in the Humanities alike – tend to respond to that claim by emphasising the limitations on basic rights and freedoms, not to mention the material privation and physical suffering, currently experienced by so many people around the world. These kinds of questions about AI must, therefore, constitute a line of enquiry for another day.

“Today,” we say, kicking the can down the road, “We have classes to teach and committee meetings to attend. Students to counsel. Emails to send.” And we have assignments to mark, lots of them. But there’s the rub! Increasingly those assignments will be produced by, or with the help of, AI. Another day – tomorrow – is coming sooner than we think. In fact, it’s here today.