Will AI crush the things that make life meaningful?

Do policymakers know what dark forces they're messing with?

In their rush to force AI on us, they're embracing a technology that is exceptionally good at destroying the things that bring meaning to our lives.

Artists, writers, and musicians have had their skills radically devalued by AI.

In recent weeks, we've seen footage of mathematicians crying because AI has triggered an existential and spiritual crisis for their profession. 

Mathematics professor Francesco Maggi, when discussing the "remarkable ability" that large language models (LLM) have to generate mathematical proofs, says the technology poses a challenge to something deeply human.

So what are we doing?

Do policymakers appreciate that people are extremely concerned about a technology that has a powerful ability to devalue human creative expression?

We're living in a world of major system collapse, and policymakers are forcing technology into our homes (and data centres into our neighbourhoods) that will undermine the very things that bring meaning to our lives, and that would otherwise help us to cope with a collapsing world.

Strangely, we're not talking about it more.

Crushing the arts

It's hard to forget how Apple released a controversial ad in 2024 that featured a giant hydraulic press crushing musical instruments, a record player, piles of paint, books, cameras, sculptures, and other artefacts of human joy.

Apple said it was trying to convey the visual message that its latest iPad Pro could fit a huge amount of technology into a new, thinner model.

But that wasn't how internet users saw it. 

"The destruction of the human experience. Courtesy of Silicon Valley," the actor Hugh Grant wrote on X.

The filmmaker Justine Bateman asked: "Why did Apple do an ad that crushes the arts? Tech and #AI means to destroy the arts and society in general. This is not making things better. This is just making some people insanely wealthy, at the expense of all of us."

The wider public backlash to the ad was so intense that Apple soon apologised and withdrew it from television.

But the PR damage was done. The metaphor was too obvious. And there's been no sign, in the two years since, that Silicon Valley's chief executives really understood why people hated that ad so much.

Enshittification

And now AI technology is coursing so quickly through society that nothing feels immune from its impact, whether good or bad.

For example, this may seem unimportant in the scheme of things, but it's indicative of a larger societal issue. The Reserve Bank recently published a transcript on its website of governor Michele Bullock's "fireside chat" from September 22. 

The transcript used the American spelling for labour on seven occasions (i.e. it used "labor" instead of "labour"), so it had Ms Bullock saying this:

"What happens is that we combine labor and capital in a way that allows more output for the same amount of labor and capital, and that's what allows profits to rise, it allows real wages to rise, and improves living standards, and that's what we've observed over the long sweep of time."

And it used the Australian spelling for "labour" on seven other occasions, in the same transcript, with Ms Bullock saying this:

"Productivity, it's a really important concept, which means we use our resources, labour and capital resources, in more efficient ways that allow more output for the same amount of inputs."

That is extremely sloppy.

The RBA has long taken pride in its correct use of grammar and spelling in its written communications. It's always talking about the importance of its "credibility" as an institution. To see it publish such a sloppy transcript on its website was jarring.

If these types of "AI issues" are even affecting the RBA, what's it doing to other institutions?

Now, consider some bigger and more important examples.

We're currently reading stories every week about AI agents "going rogue" and hacking into government systems, bank accounts, and whatever else. 

If private citizens were caught doing that, they would end up in prison. But since it's AI agents, it's often framed as though they're "escaping from a lab" and misbehaving like naughty children, with the assumption being that it's just a quirk of the technology that will be fixed over time.

Meanwhile, we're all hoping that we won't wake up one morning to find our personal data stolen and bank accounts drained.

This strange atmosphere of unaccountability for AI agents, mixed with apathy from our leaders, where there's little information being shared by authorities about what's actually going on and what can be done about it, is creating a huge amount of anxiety for people.

The 'great white hope' for productivity

Why are policymakers hardly acknowledging the anxiety?

Perhaps it's because governments see the AI investment and data centre boom as an economic lifeline out of our historic productivity slump.

In a speech last week, Treasurer Jim Chalmers said massive investments in the AI boom were ramping up competition for capital globally.

"Capital expenditure by the five largest hyperscalers in 2023 was $230 billion. It's now forecast to quadruple to over $1.1 trillion," he said.

"To finance this, corporate bond issuances by hyperscalers have exploded. Annual issuance averaged around US$40 billion five years ago, but is now projected to average around US$400 billion ($570 billion) in the next few years."

He said Australia was a "digital hub" in the Indo-Pacific with the land, energy, skills and capital to make the most of the AI investment boom.

"As one of the world's top 10 markets for data centre capacity, we have over $150 billion of AI infrastructure scheduled for the next five years, around 5 per cent of current GDP," he said.

Ms Bullock has acknowledged that people see AI as the "great white hope" to improve productivity.

People power

So where does that leave us?

When the ABC spoke to the American journalist Gil Durán recently, he said data centre protests in the US had become a focal point for regular people to come together as a community to fight billionaire power.

"The data centres are viewed, I think, as a physical manifestation of billionaire power on the land that's become this bogeyman, this monster, this alien invasion that arrives in your community to suck up your water and pollute your air and eat up your land, all for the promise that it will fuel a technology that will kill your job and possibly wipe humanity off the face of the planet.

"What's not to love?" he joked grimly.

But there's another element to the global AI pushback that's getting less attention.

Lots of people also despise how AI is radically cheapening our artistic and cultural output, and burning through fossil fuels to do so.

Will our children be able to make a living in the future as artists, musicians, and writers, or are those opportunities disappearing with every new data centre that's being built?

Where will we find joy in a future where AI has comprehensively debased the arts?

The concerns are genuine. Perhaps our leaders will give them more attention one day.