GoKawiilI know, we’ve been waiting forever for the new Siri and it still isn’t here yet. Many are adopting the cynical view that it won’t be worth the wait, and that AI is mostly hype anyway.
I’ve long felt that my own view of AI is somewhat at odds with the very polarized views mostly expressed on the internet. That it’s a villain or a hero. That it’s a mental toddler or a professor. I don’t see it as either, but a recent experience with Claude suggested to me that it is now close to reaching a tipping point …
Neither hero nor villain
The first polarized views show up when it comes to judgments about the worth of AI and what it means for the future of humanity.
There are those who feel that AI heralds the end of humanity and that our new robot overlords will soon have all of us working in the lithium mines needed to power their batteries. That pessimistic view is that AI will soon be able to do anything humans can do today, but faster, better and cheaper.
The opposing view is that AI will unleash a utopian future where machines do all of the physical and mental labor for us, leaving humans free to explore our potential in poetry and the arts.
My personal view is that it’s going to be up to us. We’re witnessing the very beginning of a new Industrial Revolution, and we will need to be far more responsive than we were to the first. We’ll need to acknowledge that certain categories of jobs are going to disappear and it won’t necessarily be practical for all of those affected to take up a new career, especially later in life.
I recently wrote a set of thought experiments for a philosophy group I belong to in which I explored the potential need for a more generous form of Universal Basic Income. I do think that at some point we will need to create a society in which everyone has a roof over their head and food on the table irrespective of their earning capacity in an AI-powered world. (You can read the thought experiments at the end of the piece.)
Neither toddler nor professor
The second arises when it comes to the sophistication of present-day AI. On the one hand, there are those who dismiss generative AI as little more than a glorified autocomplete. On the other are those who cherry-pick the most impressive examples of what LLMs have achieved and cite those as if they are the state of the art across the board.
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