AI’s here. There’s no place to hide.

We don’t decide what a new technology will do for us. It tells us what it is capable of. Illustration by C Y Gopinath using Midjourney

Today, I heard Paul McCartney singing a song that John Lennon is famous for, Imagine. The music was exactly as in the original hit but the voice - definitely not Lennon and quite a lot like Paul. If I didn't tell you it was generated using AI - or artificial intelligence - you would not have doubted it was actually Paul. Listen to it here https://youtu.be/eHXP1UZ7IOY.

Meanwhile, TikTok has been ablaze with well-known musical names like Drake and Michael Jackson singing songs they never really sang. It's that ol' AI again, making people do and say things they never did. The music industry has its knickers in a twist and the question du jour is: Does an artist even own his voice?

As far back as February this year, I asked ChatGPT to explain to me why dogs chase their own tails, but do it in the style of Vladimir Nabokov. It did right away. In this seemingly aimless pursuit, dear reader, dogs find moments of pure joy and amusement, transcending rationality.

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I asked for a J D Salinger version. Presto! That chase of the tail? It's like they're sayin', "Hey, what's this thing doin' back here? Can I conquer it?"

What about an Alice Munro take? Asked and given: And oh, the joy they find in this whimsical pursuit! Dogs, creatures of simplicity, discover moments of pure bliss amidst the absurdity.

From San Francisco, came Replika, an AI-powered chatbot that created a virtual girl-friend who would be everythingthe real gal could never be - always available, sexy on demand, sassy, caring and beautiful, and with a perfect, made-to-order, life-like avatar. Replika is already facing legal suits for sexually inappropriate content and for manipulating emotionally vulnerable people, both powered by AI.

Meanwhile, an AI-powered drone is flying out from Canada, capable of cutting hazardous crop sprays down 90 per cent by precision-targeting only the weeds, leaving the main crop alone.

Everyone is playing with the new AI toy, fascinated, terrified, obsessed. It seems there is no area of our lives that are safe from AI, from our jobs to the contents of our refrigerators.

The big question is: What can't it do? And how soon before it does everything we do better than we do it?

I've had an answer to this question since the 1980s, when I helped introduce digital typesetting technology to a now-long-defunct newspaper called Patriot. It's a single sentence and it covers every possible technology or invention that you could throw at me, past, present and future.
If it can be done, it will be done.

We don't decide what a new technology will do for us. It tells us what it is capable of. We obey, no matter how absurd or dangerous the suggestion. Sooner or later, we make it do things it was never meant to do. Indians, especially the poorest of us, discovered this long ago and called it jugaad.

Toothpicks will pick teeth, yes, but some lass will make trending earrings out of them. They will also be converted into miniature flagpoles, used for managing small wires and cables, and twisted to become bubble wands. In the hands of a modern terrorist, they will become lethal weapons, capable of puncturing the carotid.

Rubber tyres will become the village swings, cheap chairs when half-buried in the sand outside a dhaba, and exercise equipment where a gym is too costly.

Bicycles - oh, what a universe of utilities they bring beyond getting from point A to B. As a boy I watched them being used to sharpen knives; the cyclist's pedalling spun a whetstone. In Africa, in villages cut off from power supply, the same action generates electricity that is used immediately for - what else? - charging cellphones.

No doubt someone somewhere has already discovered that music can come from the bicycle's spokes and that brisk pedalling can pump water from a well.

Toothpicks, bicycles and rubber tyres were the technologies that served us before computers, social media and AI came along. But we are now in a brave new world of drones, stem cells that can grow new eyes for old, the ability to create fake human beings who behave preposterously, and brain implants that could one day let you download your life's memories onto a hard disk.

The genie is out of the bottle. Or perhaps, more accurately, the toothpaste is out of the tube. It can't be put back. The technology that is invading our lives and minds can do things its creators never intended or envisaged. The best among us will create uses that enrich us and light up our lives. But nothing we do will stop the worst among us from creating the deepest possible darkness.

That drone that delivers your daily vegetables and Amazon goodies will also bomb civilians from a height in distant lands and help your government monitor your movements.

People will be delighted, and people will be hurt. People will live better lives, but some will exist in misery. The technology will decide what you can do with it.

So I repeat: If it can be done, it will be done.

Sooner or later.

You can reach C Y Gopinath at cygopi@gmail.com

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The views expressed in this column are the individual's and don't represent those of the paper