COMMENT | Our brave new world of artificial intelligence

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

- George Orwell

COMMENT | George Orwell was right about “control" but in 2025, he is probably wrong about “who”. It may not be “Big Brother”, that enigmatic, all-seeing leader of Oceania, a totalitarian state controlled by the Party, who will get to lay his hands on the past, present and future.

It could well be artificial intelligence, AI.

Yes, AI will surely usher in a new information age, mankind’s fifth. The first information age, lasting a few millennia, was the voice protocol. Information was shared by shouting out loud. The louder, the better. And people with a good voice were often honoured and revered.

Then, some four millennia ago came the age of writing, first on shells, bones, clay tablets and stone, followed by paper, papyrus and parchment. We laboriously wrote down things by hand. And people who wrote neatly and without error were called scribes, not scribblers.

These handwritten texts of the second age of information were read out to the unlettered. Making copies of these texts took time and more scribes. The newly invented printing block produced more copies, but it couldn’t appease the ever-growing hunger for more knowledge and information.

You can almost hear the voices of people from the centuries past, pleading for more of what, when, who, why and how - the beating heart of what it means to be human! The thirst for knowledge and information was huge, but its supply was limited and carefully guarded and controlled.

Along came Herr Guttenberg some five centuries ago. He converted a wine press into a printing press. Pamphlets, newspapers, and books were soon literally flying off these presses. Our third information age! Books were printed by the thousands. People were now reading things for themselves.

Then, decades ago, came the magic of binary information. The fourth information age is centred on the computer! We sent and received information at the click of a button. And we could also bypass the censors in the pay of governments, Big Brother type or otherwise.

But there was a problem. There was propaganda and misinformation, and fake news and false narratives from both sides of the power divide. And also information overload. There was only so much our brains could process. Both governments and the rakyat were confused. Like now.

Clearly, our puny brains needed help to understand the vast amount of available information to prevent sense from becoming nonsense. Or even worse still, believing nonsense as gospel truth. By now, the internet, Facebook and WhatsApp were mainly used like e-versions of printing blocks and presses.

Transformation

Enter the fifth information age. In moving from the experimental to the essential, AI is radically transforming the information landscape. And unlike plain old stand-alone information, AI is increasingly regenerative and creative.

Simply put, it can think, almost like us, constantly connecting the dots from the world over and across silos.

And it is infinitely better at analysing and collating mountains of information/data and tying it up. And unlike us dogmatic humans with often catatonic minds, AI is receptive to a multiplicity of views and ideas - its “mind” is open and willing to learn and unlearn at every turn without screaming, “Susah lah” (It’s hard).

Given more time, AI will out-think us for sure. It has even been caught out making up case law, what AI calls “hallucination”, not lying, a word reserved only for us vile humans. But only those who have been living the good lie are most likely to be caught off guard by AI going rogue, peddling hallucinations.

And the ones who should be most fearful of AI when it is at its truthful best are our historians. The disconnect between their version of history and what you can find in the records will be exposed, making us wonder who has been hallucinating all this.

And to think cannabis is banned in our country! Our official history needs a desperate fix. Otherwise, it will take a massive hit. Only the greedy and the corrupt will say, “Who the hell cares!” But we do, because a nation cannot be built on blatant lies, half-truths and flag jingoism.

All is not lost. AI can and will open up the closed Malaysian mind, freeing the proverbial katak, toad, from that rotten tempurung, coconut shell. Blinded by the vast array of knowledge, the freed katak will first blink before swallowing a lump in its throat. The poor, poor thing!

Then, before you know it, millions of enlightened kataks will begin to discard the lies, half-truths and vile propaganda of the past into the rubbish bin of history, filling it to overflowing. And you don't need a massive dumpsite or a landfill. Just press “Delete” or “Block” repeatedly.

Vast and complex

But AI won’t stop at only freeing kataks from coconut shells. Governments will find it hard to pull the wool over our eyes, or, given our context, the sarong, samfu and saree over our heads. Before long, revisionist historians will be out of a job after a lifetime of lying and manipulating.

And politicians and academics who make outrageous, chauvinistic claims about the past will be laughed at in their faces, not behind their backs. Their speeches and papers will be scrutinised not by their fellows, prone to “you scratch my back, I will scratch yours”, but by mighty mountains of data analysed by AI.

Propagandists will be exposed as mere apparatchiks talking through their hats. Many will be remembered in great detail for looting the nation’s coffers, just like their party bosses of questionable DAA (discharge amounting to an acquittal) and DNAA (discharge not amounting to an acquittal).

And what of our newspapers, which have profited handsomely by keeping us abreast of our own ignorance all these years?

Their fate will be like the old Malay proverb: Hidup segan, mati tak mahu, literally “shy to live, die also don’t want”. To make amends, they should open up their archives and highlight in red ink the deliberate lies they told us all these years before turning them into the “Museum of the Big Lie”.

But we have a more immediate problem at hand: With AI looking over our shoulders, how will we explain to future generations one of the most turbulent and theatrical periods in our country’s history, spanning the years from 2010 to 2025? A mountain of information is out there in the public domain.

Will we gloss over the 1MDB fiasco, Umno’s eventual fall from grace, the lengthy trials of its top echelons, the opposition taking power in Putrajaya and then falling out among themselves, Anwar Ibrahim’s royal pardon and the shameless Sheraton Move by claiming in our e-history books that all this was nothing more than a foreign conspiracy carried out by people who were jealous of our success?

Surely the time has come for us to be truthful about ourselves, our history and our future. And just like the banks that were too big to fail, AI is too vast and complex to be controlled by any government. They cannot turn it into Big Brother to watch over us.

For the first time in our history, it is you, me and Everyman who will watch over the government.

Long live AI!

MURALE PILLAI is a former GLC employee. He runs a logistics company.

The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of Malaysiakini.

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