Seems every blog needs to comment on AI. Well here it goes.
I’m not going to go into definitions and the like. This merely puts out a simple take after some passive thinking.
Of all the macro trends - I would place AI as something that I am relatively less interested, engaged, informed vis-a-vis the hype in gets. I would go so far to say that hype is negative correlated with my interests. The more overblown and noise an area receives, the less inclined I am to intellectually engage.
But nonetheless, its a rightfully important and impactful area, and I am compelled to reflect on where that puts me and the things I care about within this context.
Inevitability of the Technology
I embrace technlogical advancement.
Of course, the pace of which can be scary and terrifying, but I find myself rather disinterested towards the discourse of speed and regulation.
I therefore accept, that AI will continue to be a trend driven by the ingenuity and brilliance of Human Creativity. Hmm seems my Utilitarian thinking is leaking out.
Like inequality, its unstoppable.
At the core of the issue, things run amok when there is no one motivated or no one able to regulate this adequately. I see several similarities to the reason why inequality cannot be solved: Because no one is tracking or balancing the trade offs. This leads to two areas of further commentary in the context of AI: i) the Democratisation of Technology and the ii) Ideology of the Technology
The Democratisation of Technology
Give mankind Excel, and man will keep count and calculate.
Give a mankind guns and man will fight, deter, and invade.
In each case, tools are fundamentally, an extension of human will, human desire and human nature.
So Ive rather liked the “Excel” analogy in thinking abut how technology spreas and can be used. Its fundamentally about tools of creation and tools for productivity. Excel could be used, in equal and similar measures to account for donations for a save-the-puppies movement as much as it can be used to track key installations to bomb for a terrorist attack.
That said, how much and how quickly the extension of human thought, can be channeled through the tools can vary vastly - a man with a spreadsheet is much less likely to deal with potentially tricky situations vs a man with a gun.
The Ideology of AI is Different
I consider one main difference between AI and some of the other examples, is that its technological performance could be directly related to its performance.
AI, at least from what I glean - requires large amounts of data which is made possible through a degree of centralisation.
This natural tension between decentralisation (of data collection) and centralisation (of data use) predicates itself on a specific trade-off of ideology. (and again, hardly infomred on this as a I avoid AI trend articles like the plague).
Indeed, this is evident in east and west thinking. Perhaps in an eastern context, a central authority can tightly govern how data is collected and how data is used. In an western sense, decentralisation has led to free-market capitalism - the productisation of data collection as well as data use.
It is unclear which model is “better”. Where the eastern sense could succeed to collecting every inch of data, it could be restrained in its eventual use. There is, as with many things, no right or wrong.
Yes, I agree its very revolutionary
My usual instincts (after having had to professionally dabble in “sensing” and “futurism”) are to dismiss articles around breakthroughs, and the like. I would like to think my pursuit intellectual honesty keeps me healthily sceptical to bullshit.
However…I am a believer that AI is as radical and revolutionary as such authors comment (although I don’t actually read those articles in detail). To me, this has to do with another fundamental truth when looking back at history: The Finitude of Human Life.
Note: Of course, people are looking into human longevity, but lets tackle these trends one at a time.
Human finitude as the constraint to breakthroughs in knowledge
For a long time, a lot of my beliefs and thinking structure has been predicated on the element of finitude.
In the current age of information overload , the limiting factor to human achievement is not ingenuity, but to be able to build and synthesise the learnings of countless of millenia worth of information and data, to find the critical breakthroughts needed to progress to the next level.
I view the comparative lack of breakthoughs (comparative in the sense of resources, access to technology etc) stemming from fact that there are now very few single humans who can possibly digest, stand on the shoulders of innumerable giants and achieve a critical breakthrough that will go down in history.
It is the reason too, that the term and definition of Polymaths or Renaissance men no longer exist in the modern context with an equivalent impact on humanity.
Democratised AI has the potential to do two key things that address this:
- Agglomerate and synthesise more information than one human mind in one human lifespan can ever hope to achieve
- Radically increase the productivity and ability of each human being (its a numbers game after all), to stand on the shoulders of giants sooner, arther than alter.
What I expect to come:
- The further democratisation and individualism of AI.
- The movement to exploiting ai to ai relationships
- A greater rise in business models such as: AI2AI, b2b
- Regulation will still sorta lag though…