No B.S Friday: AI is getting wild. Can we keep up?
When I take my eyes off the money, do you know what I reckon the most interesting thing going on right now is?
A.I.
In the second half of the year we got some massive flexes from AI driven art and language processing.
It’s already amazing and is evolving at such a pace that its actually hard to imagine where we’re going to end up in just 3 to 5 years.
I think this is a total game-changer. It’s bigger than Bitcoin. It’s bigger than the internet.
This is going to totally change the world.
And you know what the biggest change is going to be?
It’s going to come with humanity waking up to the idea that humans aren’t all that special.
Once the machines could do manual stuff better than us, we said, ‘oh well they don't have creativity'. This decade the machines will do creativity better than us – make better visual art, write better poetry etc. we will realise creativity isn't magical – that's its just the novel application of established aesthetic principles, and AI can do it much faster and a much more intense scale than any human ever could.
But little old humans – at least in the Abrahamic religions – have a whole mythology built up around humans being the most special thing in existence. That's going to be less and less tenable.
If humans are special, it’s going to be increasingly hard to say why.
That might give us some humility. It might make us stop and look around and think, “Oh, maybe we shouldn’t treat the earth as our own private playground / rubbish tip.
But it's more likely we'll just come up with more contrived ways to justify how special we are. We'll romanticise ourselves. We'll hear arguments similar to the arguments for LPs over digital music: “Yes, humans are weaker and more
inconvenient on every metric that matters, but there's a certain shittiness that is authentic and endearing.”
(“Humans are special because they feel love,” is one of the contrived arguments I’m talking about.)
I'm not sure, but I think we're going to have to deal with a big shock to our self-perception, and that's probably going to play out in weird ways.
And you know the weirdest thing? The last frontier where humans will be overtaken by machines is ball-sports! Hitting a moving ball is incredibly hard for machines, let alone navigating dynamic terrain while kicking one.
At some point we'll be like, machines are better than us at everything, but we're still the best at soccer!
(See! Don’t come crawling to me when the Robot Apocalypse comes Mr Jenkins!)
But they'll beat us eventually.
I don’t know how this plays out. Humans will need to eat some humble pie, and I'm just not sure we can. We have zero track record on that.
So I don't know. It could get ugly. It could be marvellous.
But I do know that right now, we have front row seats to a revolution.
What a time to be alive!
JG.
ruth says
The programming behind AI is still the product of human brains.
Boio-Bess Daro says
Whatever comes out in the human world is still manufactured devised and all thought out by human beings and is manmade in the end! But has been created with its own mind to emulate and made like us so is so interesting and exciting to anticipate the end results or outcomes! We are just never satisfied and hungry for more and more! Whether it is Ego or Hunger or to Serve? But Kudo to those who take the lead, time, and effort to create! for whatever reason! Congratulations or what?
Thank you, John. G. From Boio-Bess