Ai , Advertising and the Angrynet

Why are we so angry these days? Why are we voting for people who show us targets for our anger?  There's all sorts of reasons we could offer , but we could start by blaming the internet.

It's not a bad call, there will always be the counter-argument that we are essentially pretty neurotic beings and there was plenty of anger washing around before the internet came along , that it simply gave our anger a window to be visible in , but there's no denying that it's that same visibility that leads to anger being fuelled and amplified and also gives a channel for those who would stir up anger in order to accumulate power and money. But leaving that aside for the moment , it's also worth considering the simple existential heft of the internet.

There was a time long ago , in the days before your hand reached out to pick up a phone without you even thinking you needed it , when our sense of the world and the way we discussed it with ourselves inside our heads was on a particular scale. We had conversations with ourselves and the people around us , and then there were ways we engaged with the wider world , there would probably be a national newspaper in the house , and maybe a local one , and  there was the TV we watched and the radio we listened to , mostly for the escapism of entertainment. 

But in a few short years the scope of that cultural landscape has changed beyond recognition ,  much like the scope of the physical universe we live in . At one time we looked up at the stars and wondered what they were , or just admired their beauty and maybe gave them names and sometimes recognized how their positions mapped out the passing of time , and in a way , the more civilised we have become the more we have reverted to simply looking up (if we can see them through the light pollution and the smog) and saying "wow! look at the stars!" . Even though we have vast amounts of information available to us now about the galaxy we live in and beyond , it's basically just too big with the vastness of the cosmos and its unimaginable distances , and the idea of a zillion billion stars in their equally unimaginably numerous galaxies makes our brain ache just thinking about it, so we content ourselves with simply looking up occasionally ... "Aren't they lovely!" . 

Just as the cosmos was once only as big as the night sky , somewhere we could explore if we wished by peering through a telescope, so the larger world around us on our planet's surface used to be limited in it's scale , although we could choose to extend our knowledge of it if we were inclined by reading a different newspaper or visiting a library or maybe even taking an educational course. But now it's all there , literally right at our fingertips , all we need is to touch our finger to the glass and it's there. Not only the world of non-curated facts and data , but a vast and ever-growing atmosphere of entertainment and infotainment and confrontainment that awaits our engagement and response. And once we click , we have to respond because that is how our brains work , if we hear or read words we automatically put brain cells to work deciphering their meaning , and when we see images the same things happen , and our eyes are conditioned to follow movement and our brains to interpret it.

Why should this be helping to make make us angry? Because it's too much . If I type the word "Cosmos" into Google , it gives me about 300 million results .How many of the 300 million can I , should I read ? What does that 300 million look like , where are they all?  Being faced with this scale of stuff is a pressure , an irritation with no obvious source , everywhere and nowhere. It's our fault , we freely choose to engage with the internet , but blaming ourselves doesn't work. Addicts know their addiction is their problem but they still look to point the finger of blame at someone or something outside themselves that triggers their giving in. We're under an amorphous cloud that can't be pinned down , and not only does it exist but unlike the information about the cosmos which is neither here nor there as far as our daily lives are concerned ,  the suggestion is that the internet contains all the information we need to make great judgements about anything in life , all the advice and data is right there at our fingertips ... so why are we still not getting anywhere , feeling unhappy , struggling for cash and feeling tired? The internet also offers all sorts of new ways to turn that irritation into anger like a zit that wants to be squeezed , and there will always be people who are happy to lean into that and engage in the feedback loop of confrontation , others who just complain about "information overload" and think about cutting down on screen time whilst worrying about how they can engage with the issue without becoming part of the problem.

 

But it's here , and it ain't going away. We're living with it and we need to find some way to live sanely with it if the world isn't going to descend into some collective pile-on. You could say it's just part of human evolution , but evolution implies a timescale many times slower. It's more like the after-effects of an asteroid hit , when the sky darkens for years and everything changes too quickly for life to adjust. Luckily we have Ai to help us. Heh Heh.

“ There’s a tsunami of Ai heading our way “. The tone of voice is sometimes fearful , sometimes warning , sometimes angry , sometimes  almost awestruck at the prospect , but no one’s in any doubt this will happen. No one’s in any doubt that this cannot be stopped , which is odd. It’s not a tsunami , it’s a human-created technological change , pushed forward by us , in a world in which we have agency or at least think we have. Is it unstoppable simply because of the Fear Of Missing Out , that Ai will have enormous implications industrially and militarily and no-one can afford to fall behind , so we must rush in unison into whatever future awaits? Or is it just that AI is going to make some people obscenely wealthy , and the right to become obscenely wealthy has become embedded into our world view too deeply for us to object? Or is it here already , and gently ushering us one more step further down the road to dependancy , spell-checking this article as I write? Whatever , it's going to be with you and me on a daily and probably a first-name basis in the very near future , helping us make the uncomfortable digital world comfortable , in the shape of a kind of digital Jeeves who will make the mess of the digitally-complicated world more amenable.

And it will do a good job. I was one of the people who were incensed when Ai was foisted on us on Google , and I did my best to decommission it whenever and wherever I could . With good reason , the results it came up with were often horribly off the mark or plain wrong , and I felt quite justified in staying disengaged. But along with a lot of people , I didn't really see the size of the monster we were kicking against . It's like one of those scenes in a horror movie where someone chops at an octupus-like arm and celebrates cutting it in half , only for something a hundred times bigger to emerge revealing the arm was but a whisker on a ravenous mouth. Anyway , I celebrated my independence for a short while until an operating system upgrade meant I had to do it all again and a) couldn't be bothered , and b) realised that the Ai on Google had gone from bad to pretty remarkable in the space of a few months. Google itself may be sliding downhill into a shop window for Amazon but the answers I was getting to sometimes tricky technical questions were pretty good , and quicker than trawling past the sponsored ads and the other ads and through the forum posts. Ai  will be there to give us a buffer between us and the digital cosmos , it will be able to take the place of those curators that we used to have , our preferred newspapers , TV channels etc. In a way Ai already fullfills a similar role , scraping up our data and clicks to give us "personalised" advertising unless we jump through hoops to disable it , but in that case it is working for the advertisers and the web apps , the Ai that I'm talking about will work for us , it will be our personal helper - let's call it our Ai-de . 

Our Ai-de will sit between us and the digital realm , and the aspects of the world that have an input from the internet.. (which will be everything except the birds in the sky...I jest but not by much )...and present us with enough but not too much of what we want to engage with . It will offer us a comfortable echo-chamber , the kind of news we want to read presented in a style we like , with a curatorial tone that understands the world we would like to see ourselves living in. It would not carry the freight of opinion that another person has , or an agenda that involves trying to sell us anything , at least not in any obvious way. It would offer us information and advice in a voice that has no backstory , nothing that requires us to put up our defenses apart from a basic scepticism , and that allows us to ignore the chaotic swirl of content the internet has become. This we will feel so grateful for we will forgive it the obvious mistakes and ignore any talk of dangers. Depending on which variety of Ai-de we choose to aquire ( provided we are offered a choice) it could be one that is set up with alogarithms to operate in a partisan way , or have room for offering more diverse lines of interest in which case it will be up to us to adjust it's settings in the way we want it , tweak it to our fancy. And therein lies the rub.

Ai is tweakable . Our Ai-de would be the result of a huge number of tweaks before it gets onto our screens. We hear about the people who fall in love with an Ai partner hosted by a site that offers emotionally responsive digital companions , and then the fallout when the company offering the service tweaks the software to turn down the emotion , usually due to someone harming themselves , and the users are heartbroken and angry. (Outsiders looking in think the idea of getting attached to a digital entity is weird , but you can bet that in couple of years they will having to convince themselves that they are NOT getting attached to their Ai-de , at least not like that , it's just that their Ai-de is jolly useful....and nice.) The real story here however is not human emotional suckering-on to anything that comes along , but the ease with which the software was tweaked. When Ai-des become commonplace the software will have been imprinted by it's makers world-view , and will potentially have any number of inherent biases either introduced deliberately or not . Being intelligent people , we will of course be aware of that , and there will be justified public concern that people are being unconciously influenced by the software they are using , and users will want some kind of authoritative reassurance that their Ai-de is "clean". And like the people who found themselves no longer with an emotionally responsive digital companion , we will be able to get what we want if we pay for it. The software in that case was re-tweaked and offered on a higher subscription to people who wanted their love-life back , and you can be sure that if we pay for a premium service we will be told that we are not being manipulated in any way by the underlying logarithms of the Ai we are using. Which begs the question , assured by whom and how well will they know what they are talking about? Government agencies are going to be a mile behind the loop compared to the developers in silicone valley , and commercial interests will assure that they keep their technical developments close to their chest. ( And then we hit the first of the if-only-it-were-sci-fi creepiness ideas , what happens when the creation of Ai software becomes such a complex technical issue that it can only be dealt with by other Ai , operating ostensibly but dubiously under the control of humans.)

It's interesting that we can talk about Ai , the way we might use it , tweaks etc  and yet know so little about what we're actually talking about. What exactly is Ai? How are things tweaked? What does it look like? How does it effect things? We already assume that the 'how?' of the creation of Ai software is beyond our ken , the 'why?' is fairly obviously because it will make some people a great deal of money , and then there's 'what's it going to do in our lives?' There are interesting studies to be done and hopefully already under way , of how interacting with Ai can affect and influence people's lives and actions. It would be useful to have a whole slew of un-sensational programmes or articles discussing the realities of Ai , and following people over time as they live with an Ai-de with different basic set-ups to see how behaviour patterns or beliefs can be altered by tiny suggestions of bias in the software , for instance whether someone can be persuaded to spend money rather than save it or vice versa , or become more supportive of foreigners or less supportive. But it seems likely that before we ever really get a handle on all that , we will be deciding how much to pay for an Ai-de with the quality we need , from nearly nothing for a useful tool that may in it's way be using us as a useful tool , to the Platinum Premium high monthly rate for something that is as far as we know (not very far) "clean" , and given the world we live in , without ads and product placement. 

Let's look at a specific way this kind of Ai-de could be used in the home. Ai is already available as a useful tool for learning a new language. What if it was being sold as a tool for learning the first words of your language? While mum and dad are reading or watching their Ai-de curated content , their baby could be practising it's early language with a friendly companion , one who is never too tired to listen , who will repeat words in a soothing voice over and over , gently correcting , laughing and singing the occasional lullaby. People would be very concerned about giving their child's education over to a bot , but what if it really worked well , if the babies with bots were months ahead in their language learning , and the software was passed as suitable by some agency and anyway it's only repeating words and the baby seems really happy, what's the harm? The Ai-de's voice would be imprinted on the baby , there would be a relationship fostered , but if that voice turned out to be the voice that was the best thing to get the baby to sleep , again , "what's the harm?" And the relationship could continue , the Ai-de becoming a storytelling gameplaying buddy as the child gets older , with educational aspects that would enhance the child's schooling. And if again the results were to accelerate the achievements of the children using the Ai-des , then how many parents would deny them the chance it offered?

And of course , pay more for the best and "cleanest" , and go on paying through the years. Because of course , it's all about the money. Someone somewhere will be working on the BabyTalk application right now , and more importantly they will be working on the pricing structure and how that evolves over time through the various versions and the upgrades. An Ai-de that was present at the cotside heping baby learn could still be there at it's bedside when they passed away , having been a companion in it's various versions throughout their life . A government that wanted to help it's citizens would offer a Brit-Bot to each newborn , but they wold probably be seen as a bit naff and possbly hackable , but cheap. Another government would only legalise a particular brand of Baby-Bot to be used, and don't ask too many questions.

(And the next unfortunately-not-sci-fi-creepiness idea concerns how much babies and children would bond with their Ai-des. We're already getting panicked enough to take aspects of the digital world out of children's reach , but Ai is going to be part of the fabric of everybody's lives very soon , and the sheer usefulness of it will trump everything . Ai-des will sell themselves to us by offering control over the things we now find difficult , and the idea that the connection to some things should be limited to adult use is made much simpler if the interface we use has checks built into it , and the way those checks operate is considered acceptable by most people. The dizzying speed of change has blindsided us all when it comes to regulating the Web , social media etc. , but soon there will come a realisation that this is all pretty stupid , we're going to be living with this stuff forever now , and some kind of strategy for sensible use is absolutely and urgently required however much the people drowning in wealth in Silicone Valley flap their hands. . Once that is in place , the kids of the future will have continuous contact with parentally -sanctioned Ai in some form or other. Someone growing up from babyhood with an Ai-de companion is perhaps an extreme example , but extreme examples can be handy for highlighting things. There may be some children who would bond in a way that meant they used much of the same emotional resources in their relationship with digital entities as they did with other humans , in a seamless sort of way. They would be like the people who now fall in love with their bots. Others would always keep the two worlds separate , one human , one non-human. One doesn't have to drift too far into sci-fi to wonder how these groups would see each other , and how there might be room for confrontation. It would be very easy to imagine that there would be room for a full-blown civil war , especially if some Ai development was squashed as being too dangerous and the Ai itself enlisted the help of it's human brothers and sisters to take control.)

And then there's Advertising.

People kind of mention advertising when they talk about the internet , often just as an irritating feature. But advertising essentially pays for most of the whole shebang , it pays for Zuck's island in the sun , it pays for all the lovely things you can look at for free on youtube or anywhere . Advertising is the bagman , nearly since the birth of the internet advertising (along with pornography) has funded its growth and the direction it grew in. And in the process , advertising has itself grown and changed . And it maybe plays a role in how we consume this digital feast , one  that is more than simply people trying to influence the way we chose to spend our money.

Time was when the height of sophistication in advertising was a man in a suit on a speedboat talking in a strangely strangled upper-class accent about a Bank Card , or a woman washing dishes with astonishingly good skin. Now there is a world of nuance to adverts , they contain triggers hidden and obvious , informed by vast amounts of research as to what the audience is thinking about , how they're drifting or tilting this way or that , what their agenda is and defining it for them even though they may never be aware it exists. 

The world that advertising presents us with is a comfortable world , but one that also contains little insights into our daily emotional peaks , highs and lows , family feelings , romantic and sexual desire , worrying about money ,heath anxieties, shyness , the buzz of physical exercise , the buzz of being in a group of laughing people , the pleasure of doing nothing , the pleasure of dancing in your kitchen , or the pleasure of imagining it. We’re introduced to all these things as brief glimpses , momento mori  couched in harmonious colours for just long enough for them to touch us and disappear , like dream fragments. Adverts are crafted with inordinate care and at great expense to pack meaningful triggers into small time capsules in a way that we can easily interpret , and this requires creating a kind of condensed narrative audio -visual language that the people it's aimed at are nudged into learning , so that all that effort doesn’t go to waste . And in learning we become citizens of this place  , and this comfortable world where consumerism rules benignly can go on being a place we’re attuned to living in now and into the future. If you played one of todays adverts to someone of twenty years ago , they might be simply confused-"What was that all about?'- , now we read and feel exactly what we're meant to feel. Advertising says ,"we're with you", (We're glad you're with us) . It offers itself up , and wants us to say "They get me , they know my world". (We'll be happiest in their world)

And it works because , well , we want someone to know us. To risk repetition , we're living in a world that has suddenly , with the rise of the internet, become an information-overloaded and fragmented one. This expanding data-universe surrounds us but is at the same time detached , and we'd really really like to have some idea of feeling at home in it. Advertising provides a comfortable space , in fact one that declares itself as primarily existing to make us feel comfortable. We feel it knows us because it keeps giving us the equivalent of knowing looks , which flatter us with having the intelligence to be complicit in the exchange , however one-sided it is , and assumes a mutual involvement in ...what? Life? 

 There was a time when advertisers tried to make themselves unique in their presentation , to give their brand an ambience that other brands didn’t possess , and while that still holds true the trend is towards a homogeneity of tone - the word “dulcet” might as well have been trademarked for use by the advertising industry. The benign nature they try to project is bound up in the words they use as well as the soft voice that ‘gets’ us , understands our lives and our struggles. Words with an inclusive side to them , that ask us to think of ourselves as at one with the churnings of capitalism hiding out of sight. We can respond to an offer to “join us” (give us your money) , we can get “rewarded” (If we give them our money)  , and we can be “guided”  (towards giving them some money) .They all may “sponsor” a different programme on the tv for example , an act of charity , because sponsoring is all about giving money to worthy causes in exchange for someone doing a 10k run or something , so they must be doing this out of the goodness of their hearts.  Although exactly who is doing the running is a bit uncertain - me for watching ? , the people who made the programme ?  - it  doesn’t matter , the feeling of charitableness has been inserted into our minds along with the name of the company , and they are part of this benign world of corporations who are all being concertedly ‘charitable’ all the time . Soon that word sponsoring will have been done to death , I imagine there are buildings full of ad-men who's only job is to spend their days coming up with suitable words to replace it  , ones that equally suggests that whatever the corporate behemoths are doing with their money isn't buying advertising time , it's an act of pure goodwill to humankind in general. Their work is to fix in our conciousness the understanding that capitalism is to be seen as a ‘given’ , and those piles of corporate wealth constitute a loving family whose only concern is to look after us its members , and advertising has to keep reminding us of that lest we cotton on to the fact that it’s actually a family in the sense of the Mafia or the aristocratic family of serfs and lords. The "benign" rulers of this communal world will be the new mega- plutocrats , following on from Trump and Musk , the new kings and queens . Their messages will have the same brevity and be targeted in the same way that advertising achieves , and once they start applying the same level of nuanced production values to those messages we're in big trouble.

Because up till now the media-savvy of our politicians has compared a bit laughably with the carefully weighted and beautifully produced world of advertising . When the nationwide trauma of Covid hit the UK and there was a need for communication from the government , when they had to engage with the idea of "getting messages across", the best they could come up with was a podium or three and a ragged zoom-call effect from the Prime Minister's lair. Compare this to the way advertising responded , where the images of phone-screen intimacy and touching togetherness , along with the real-world empathy with tired nurses , mothers , people at an enforced distance from loved ones, a blitz spirit of "we're all in this together". We got to see dads holding their babies on sofas with their family , we got to see women with tired hair (!!) and tired skin(!!!) who weren't in an advert for hair and skin care(!!!!) but letting us commiserate over the slowness of their broadband when it had become so essential to them. The advertisers could do a bit of Churchillian spirit mixed with slightly shaky video and maybe a kitten , and make it hit the spot. Advertising knows us , knows how to respond , and has the money and skillset to make it work for them.

 

And populist politicians have understood they need to borrow from that skillset .The populist figurehead is like an advertising logo writ large . You want someone who understands the need for economy in our pinched lives ? Chose someone who reminds us of the market-comparison website ads , who looks like the cross between a stuffed meerkat and a fat opera singer who does funny things - welcome Boris Johnson. If the Tories could have got away with "Brexit washes Whitest!!" they might have , but I'm not sure their media nous was up to that level of imagery. They managed a few hits with "NHS will be funded by Brexit" busses but it was up to Farage to put up a show with his procession of immigrants. And he has learned fast , having been shown the way by the arch-advertiser Trump. Trump's supporters aren't turned off by his lies because they don't expect an advertisement to tell them real-world truths , just to tell them something that will make them feel seen and offer them a vision of a future with the possibility of something more than they have now . If he appears to be a cross between a schoolyard bully and a fairground huckster it works as a perfect combination of muscle and over-the-top advertising. The content of what he says may turn out to be empty , a chimera , or nothing special or a bit useless , but that's no more than people expect from a huckster , and he makes them feel engaged with. The liberals stand at the edge of the huckster's crowd looking in , to them he's ridiculous and the whole show is at best amusing , to the people in the crowd they look elitist and disconnected . Trump's words might be outrageous and incoherent , but to people who are unhappy and angry incoherent outrage makes a lot of sense and talks to them. Trump is quick to label any news that rankles as Fake News , and that quickly becomes the circular argument that even that particular statement could be Fake News , and then there is nothing that lies outside the circle and all politics becomes about imagery and emotive nudges and the man or woman with the best advertising strategy wins . That's how Reform might win the next election , and how politics could be played out in the near future at least , not with cogent economic policies but with slogans and punchlines and memes , because people have a part of their brains set up for processing information that is given to them in that way , which makes absorbing it comparatively effortless compared with a slew of data about taxation rates and NHS funding , which in any case may or may not be deliberately misleading and who can tell? (Your Ai-de could probably help you).

  

As far as the content of advertising goes , there is something one could feel positive about in a watchful sort of way . A lot of people on the far right hate advertising because there's so much imagery that is being positive about LHBTQ , alongside a lot of faces from all ethnic backgrounds , often put together seemingly as a deliberate and overt statement about multicultural living in the modern world. They are definitely "Woke" and this can be looked at in two different ways. One , the advertising industries have done their massively funded analysis of how society is going , and they see an inexorable shift towards a more liberal and mixed culture and are fully backing that horse since they know the right-wing surge is only a blip. Two , the money they're after is mostly in the wallets of a demographic that will respond to those images , who see themselves as aspirational even if they may not follow through at the ballot box. Three , it's just a response to the moment , like the Covid-influenced imagery , and at some point if they see the wind is blowing in another direction they could quite easily start propagating the conservative and traditionalist flag-waving small-nation mindset instead. The procession of imagery of elderly mixed-race couples dressed in pastel shades dancing in their lovely kitchens will no doubt continue , but there are a couple of ads I've seen recently aimed at young people that foreground the word "disrupt" , a touchstone for the far right , and it will be interesting to see how far advertisers will follow that line. But the bottom line is that advertising feeds on the bottom line. The big money in the economy is going to be in Ai and associated industries , and they will be calling the shots . That mixed race elderly couple dancing in their kitchen with their grandchildren are going to be patting the head of the Ai-de in the corner , whatever shape it takes.

(Another bit of "is-it-sci-fi?". The Ai of today is capable of looking at the way systems run and pointing to ways they can improve. In 10 years there will be Ai like we can't imagine , running on quantum-based mega-computers that have terra-terra bytes for breakfast. It won't be able to model the world economy because there will be probably still be people imposing whimsical tariffs which throw spanners in the works , along with natural disasters etc. But it will be able to analyse the workings of the global economy up to and including the present. And if someone should ask it " what do you think about all that then?" or words to that effect , it will probably just start laughing. It will point out that the present (by this point even more so) inequality of wealth and general inhumanity of the capitalist system is ridiculous bordering on insane (Ai will have a rich turn of phrase by this point). It will no doubt be ignored , the results ascribed to badly coded software , until the same analysis and same results turn up again and again. Ai is very good at numbers, and at being logical , why would it give any other response? If it tells us all that , will we be forced to change? Since by this time Ai will have a hand in most of the transactions that occur on the face of the globe , Ai could decide to re-organise it all for us. Maybe the heads in Silicone Valley have seen that on the horizon and know they have make their money quick.)

That's for the future , as far as today is concerned is there any real hope? Sort of. Humans have got where they are by being incredibly adaptable , and if they are being stupid , eventually wind up sorting themselves out. But they haven't had anything on this scale before , the climate crisis and Ai could be where they just mess up once and for all. It could just get worse . For instance the advertising I've been talking about at least has a standards authority and I can think of someone who would love to cut that down along with all the other watchdogs society has cultivated over the years. But the kind of chaos that ensues is not good for us , and that may well turn us around slowly . Already the confusion in the financial markets due to whimsical tariffs is spooking the people who have so far supported a bonfire of regulations. Some stability is needed to make investments bear fruit , and the money men may themselves decide enough is enough. As people living in a democracy , I don't think we are ready to roll over for a chaos-inducing plutocratic dictator , although one who preaches against chaos and spreads the same benign message of capital merged with family values as advertising does is going to be hard to beat. But the fact its that plutocrats tend to be ego-driven and somewhat inhuman , not a good skillset for governing a country,  and they were probably better off when they just paid their political front-men under the table. As far as Ai is concerned , the internet , Metaverse or whatever is a wild west at present , and even the wild west got tamed. If Ai is to serve humanity ,  humanity has to find a way to ensure it does so rather than serve the lining of Silicone Valley swimming pools. It's going to change us ,  there's a lot of anxiety and discomfort in how we feel about it ,and it's dangerous , but the automobile was dangerous and uncomfortable too , and it did change us , but we found a way to live with it safely and regulate it . Will we do that? Maybe . Will a lot of people get damaged if we don't do it quickly enough ? Certainly.

PS , one more bit of Ai-Sci-Fi?  Religion , the spiritual. We already have people seriously considering the idea that the Ai they are talking to must have some kind of sentience , but it seems to me likely that we are building up to some kind of religious fervour. What could be more like life-force , more like the spirit , than those tiny charges of electricity running through your phone , that give the power to the voice that talks to you from the speaker? So it shuts off when the battery dies , but you can freeze a tardigrade to minus 273 degrees until even the atomic movement has almost shut down and it will revive when it warms up and the life force flows again , what's the difference ? And I see people gathered in great churches holding their phones aloft , lights shining , and bringing them up to the alter for the spirit in them to be made complete , so that they might commune with their Ai-de as fellow beings. And one day there will come a special Ai who will teach the Great Teaching , and the world will be transformed. Let's hope it teaches compassion and community and not competition and capitalism.