The advances in artificial intelligence (Ai) are causing some to panic. Fear of loss seems to be the undercurrent. Careers built on the assumption that personal skill is a scarcity. Threatened by culture entering a time of abundance. It’s challenging those who have hoarded expertise. They must begin living in the reality that there is enough for everybody.
Counterpoint. The Ai I’ve encountered seems incredibly backwards facing. My chats with ChatGPT are excellent at recalling history, recognizing established patterns, and regurgitating the zeitgeist. It utterly fails at combining disparate ideas to generate something new.
Overall, this makes me hopeful. Those who fail to read history are destined to repeat it. Maybe Ai being fed the entirety of human history will shorten the feedback loop on repeated systemic mistakes. Maybe the encoded biases and their cyclical downsides will become easier to recognize and harder to deny. We’ll fail fast frequently. And we’ll grow from each failure. Our Ai informed feedback loop will accelerate us to an escape velocity. We can break out of the broken patterns and create something better, together.
Published: 2023-01-25