Over the last few decades, we have experienced the proliferation of computing devices (personal computer, smartphone), always-on connectivity, and the digitization of all kinds of information (digital documents, printed materials, physical world…) We have been able to use these technologies to amplify our personal efforts (finding information, creating content, communicating privately and publicly…) — making each of us more powerful and productive than ever before. Humans are good at taking disparate information and connecting the dots — creativity, insight, decision making, etc. Technology is good at computing, storage of large amounts of info, instant recall, etc. It is a profoundly powerful partnership! But, recent innovations in information technology are challenging the assumption that humans are better at creativity, insight, and decision making. Those of us who have worked with machine learning, have suspected that we can architect technology to perform as well (or even radically better) at tasks that have been traditionally attributed to be the exclusive domain of humans. We are now entering a new phase of our relationship with information technology, and will need to adjust the way we think about interfacing with it, and leveraging its power — for our personal needs, and our collective society. Perhaps to grok the shift in thinking, we can imagine the following scenario: You stumble upon a genie, who is all knowing, and whose sole purpose is to help you live your best life. You can trust it, and ask it to do anything you want. You might start off by asking it to fulfill all of your desires to test its capabilities and sincerity. Once you’re done with that, you might realize that the best way to engage with this entity is to turn things around — ask it to take the lead — let it use its power to figure out what you really want / need. Before it could do so, it would need to present you with a whole bunch of questions / scenarios / opportunities to gauge your strengths, weaknesses, biases, beliefs, desires, etc. Once it had enough signal and disambiguation, it would start to fill in the blanks — to augment your weaknesses, amplify your strengths, and be a loyal copilot in your life. Do you see the paradigm shift? Instead of you asking it to do things, it learns about you, and helps you to do things — reactively and proactively. This is the profound difference between technologies we’ve been living with, and these new breeds of technologies. Perhaps instead of learning “prompt engineering” — how to craft text queries in order to get a response from AI — we should start figuring out how to digitize our states of being in order to provide AI with the information it needs to wrap itself around our needs? What do you think? #ai
Yep. And for the relationship with AI to be exponentially beneficial for society, we need to be able to understand what those inner desires truly are, without the distortion of our ego. Which means that we all need to do the work to clear our own trauma to ensure we don't create yet another set of systems built on fear.
In a word, synergy. In a sentence, we need to let the AI play to its strengths in being useful to us, while we focus on what is most important and uniquely advantageous for us. It's how we would treat any other tech tool, but with AI it gets frightening to some to realize our 'unique' talents are not as unique as we thought.
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1yThrilling but also terrifying to be honest. If we think about our society today, learned on steroids, and the way bias and subjective pov will be infused into AI, intentionally or not, that’s concerning. When I think about the world my children will grow up in, doing less thinking for themselves, being fed information already sliced and diced for them. The simple lack of handwriting today which is proven to help develop the brain, the blue light of electronics and addiction of social media, the alarming increase of mental health conditions, particularly across teens, those are some of the dots I’m connecting right now. There are promising aspects of AI that can help the world immensely but there are real consequences to that also which cannot be underestimated, in my opinion.