The Cost of Outsourcing Our Thinking

In the 21st century we have outsourced much of the menial and the mundane; what was once a buzzword for companies in the late 20^th century, outsourcing became monetised and standardised at an individual level in the early 21^st century.

We subscribed to streaming services for our audio and visual entertainment, simply to avoid the hassle of purchasing and maintaining physical media. As a result, many have accepted, or at the least are resigned to accept, the curation of content from these platforms to ease the burden of selecting from a seemingly endless choice of content.

We subscribed to news aggregators and hashtags so that we have a seemingly collected overview of the news, and we turned on notifications so that we can know of any developing stories barely moments after they have been reported. The term “yesterday’s news” almost seems romantic now, the thought of reading through a newspaper or magazine archaic.

Collected information was once confined to the walls of libraries and the realm of bookshelves but it now exists omni-present, merely a glance away on the screens of our many devices. Even the interaction with those devices has been outsourced through the use of digital assistants and home automation. The irony of naming digital-assistant driven audio devices “Smart Speakers” has been tragically lost through our laziness-induced ignorance.

The tasks adopted by these digital crutches do not involve heavy lifting or concentrated mental effort. They are purely for convenience - to save time in a world which appears to have never moved faster than it does today. It is undeniably an economic privilege to be able to pay for the monthly subscriptions of various applications and the year-on-year device upgrades needed to run them. Yet this is not purely out of the desire to appear to be ahead of the curve and up-to-date but because this system has been forced upon us through controlled obsolescence and iterative development, where now standardised development practices allow the creation and release of software and hardware which has only been tested to the point of acceptability and not to the point of reliability.

As a result, we, the users, have become the testbed. Feedback and error reports used to be the domain of product testers and developers but are now part and parcel of any form of digital interaction. The tech industry has managed to monetise our complaints by using them to fill in their own development gaps. The fact that most are oblivious to this is part of the reason why the development of artificial intelligence (AI) has been so rapid and successful. The now ubiquitous use of the thumb up/thumb down choice is attached to almost every interaction with a digital interface, including AI. We simply see it as a cute and convenient way to provide feedback. Those behind these systems know this binary response is data gold.

And what is our reward for this invisible contribution? Free AI? Certainly, for the moment, we have access to a variety of freely available AI programmes but these are not the versions which will ultimately be used in the professional domain – the domain which generates money.

At the moment, the free AI software available to anyone with an internet connection is the training ground for the industrialised versions which will generate income for the companies behind them. Once the inevitable payment model takes hold, controlled obsolescence will naturally come into play, because to stop the AI bubble from bursting companies have to begin generating income from the technology and shareholders demand continual growth.

Those shareholders, along with governments, have gambled big with their investments. It has been estimated by Bloomberg Intelligence analyst, Mandeep Singh, that in 2024 alone, more than $344 billion was spent on AI infrastructure, a figure which does not include maintenance or energy costs. The levels of energy used by AI systems are predicted by the International Energy Agency to double by 2030 and the cost for companies and consumers (both those who use AI directly and those who do not) will rise at a similar rate. Vast amounts of money, both privately and publicly sourced, is being spent on a system which will be more expensive to maintain than it is to build.

Much like the dot com bubble of the early 21st century, the pretenders in this development race will fall away and disappear, leaving only a handful of participants to continue. Eventually, the race will reduce to two or three major companies and when we reach that point the technology will have undoubtedly become pervasive, not necessarily because it is worthy but because we will have invested so heavily in it that it has to be, else, it will end up being the costliest example of the sunken cost fallacy in human history. To prevent that from happening will require control or the economic ramifications will be catastrophic.

Control will come in many flavours, as it does now with many universal technologies. There will be limitations based on one’s choice of device - choose not to upgrade your hardware and you will be unable to run the software. Access will be time based - no premium subscription will limit the hours you can use the technology because energy will be at a premium. Location will decide what functions you can access - there will undoubtedly be political and competitive reasons for certain AI services and functionality being unavailable in specific locations. 

And then there will be the oldest kind of control: class. This will not be an explicit form of control - it will simply come about as a result of the reasons already listed and the ramifications will be much greater. The impact on health and education will be measurable. Factor in the already increasing socio-economic divide taking place across the planet right now and it does not paint a pretty picture for those who will lack the privilege of access to a technology being touted as the panacea to all of humanity’s problems.

AI development is about to reach an era of gladiatorial combat with the final fight for supremacy and relevance. Some will pay for the privilege to be in that arena and to feel like part of the victory. Others will merely hear the events unfold from outside. 

No doubt our tech-bro emperors will give a thumbs up to that.