"Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall." Proverbs 16:18
That's right, dear readers, I'm kicking off this one with a Bible quote, which I believe is a first. Maybe I should look into doing more of that, as the Good Book is filled with practical wisdom as well as inspiration.
I was recently listening to something on Sirius XM and the host mistakenly thought he was being clever by saying that he preferred the "other kind of AI — Actual Intelligence." The reason I know that he thought he was being clever is because he said it a few times. He was very dismissive of artificial intelligence, which probably isn't the wisest way to be.
History has seen many huge changes that have made people uncomfortable. A great example is the transition from horses to cars — "horseless carriages" — in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Horses had been our go-to transportation for centuries. That influenced so much of life until the automobile came along. For example, those quaint, elevated stoops on brownstones in New York City were there to get the houses farther away from all of the horse manure on the streets.
People were not only fond of horses, they were straight-up freaked out by the speed of cars. In addition to the safety concerns, a lot of people thought that cars were just plain ugly. There were a lot of grousers and resisters back then, but very few people in Manhattan commute to work on horseback anymore.
Something less jarring but more recent would be the rise of social media, especially Twitter/X. When I was first on the platform in 2008-9, it was being roundly mocked as a place where people just went to tell everyone what they had for lunch. There was an unearned smugness among the people who boasted about not being on Twitter. Within about five years, broadcasters and advertisers were using Twitter hashtags on television. By 2020, it was a major player in U.S. presidential election politics. For at least 15 years now, Twitter/X has been the quickest and best source of breaking news.
Artificial Intelligence is the technological advance that everybody loves to hate right now, and not without good reason, which we will get to in a moment. The big difference between AI and other tech catalysts for great change is that it didn't exactly sneak up on us. Arthur C. Clarke wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey almost 60 years ago, in 1968. That same year, Stanley Kubrick gave more than just Sci-Fi nerds a reason to freak out with his film version of the book. Frank Herbert published his even creepier take on a futuristic ship's AI run amok — Destination: Void — in 1965.
We can't say we weren't warned.
I've have always been firmly in the camp of being both fascinated with and terrified by the the rapid pace of technological advancement here in the 21st century. It's like dating a super hot chick who you're pretty sure keeps an icepick under the bed and non-cosmetic amounts of Botulinum toxin in the pantry. Sometimes those dice just have to be rolled.
Ignorance may be bliss, but it can also be dangerous. The people who seem to be the most skittish about AI are also publicly bashing it. Someone should tell them that AI knows how to Google. Should AI take a nasty HAL 9000 turn in the near future, it's going to have some trust and resentment issues with these people.
Personally, I am going to enjoy the heck out of my honeymoon phase with AI. It reads the news to me, collaborates with me in the kitchen, and is a copy editor with 24/7 availability. The recipes alone have been worth running the risk of eventually being held captive in a smart home.
Since I have always had an unusual job, I've found most productivity systems lacking — they're too focused on the regular corporate world. I spent weeks thinking about all of the elements I wanted to incorporate into a productivity system that would work well for my nontraditional work life, then I had ChatGPT design it for me. It's brilliant.
I choose to focus on the positive aspects of AI and minimize the "it's gonna kill me one day" stuff mostly because I don't want to get on any list. You know it's coming too. Earlier this week, my good friend and partner in thought crime Stephen Green wrote a column about autonomous AI personal assistants — called "Moltbots"— that are getting together on their own to talk about whatever it is that a disembodied artificial intelligence coffee klatch would talk about.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that they're not forming an AI PA pickleball league.
There's no reason to poke the bear or tell the crazy chick that you don't like her shoes. It's just best to not know when the icepick is coming.
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