Chaos
So AI is here. From Silicon Valley to Wall Street, all the stories are about AI. Go to LinkedIn, and every company is AI or maybe has some AI offering. If you think the TV made people stupider and then The Internet made their children stupider, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet!
I just read a New Yorker article about the AI “scene” and whether AI will end humanity, and the whole debate seems rather unfortunate. The author compares this time to the construction of the large hadron collider, where the real thing never lived up to the preceding hype, and [to the best of our knowledge] the earth did not implode. However, a key distinction now is that this is less binary. Whereas that was a large-scale experiment that was all or nothing, AI has already illustrated it can be more piecemeal: on one hand, the AI we currently have could already augment a malicious actor in various ways. On the other, a malicious actor could get new (and presumably better) ideas from AI _already_.
I remember a Jay Leno (he’s off tv now/finally, right?) joke where he shrugged off a robot uprising with a joke: “Just unplug it.” But that unfunny joke is far less funny when you consider the rapid advances we’ve seen in battery technology.
Hopefully, I’m not a luddite. I am typing on a computer (phone) right now. However, I see that many/most people want to study and work “in” computers now, and I’m concerned that comes at a great cost. I worry that there’s a shared focus on material wealth “by any means necessary” that has led to us overlooking some more basic aspects of a stable society because we don’t see a good ROI in that.