[This article is still in editing mode but I wanted to post it because despite the typos and crappy writing, it’s worth thinking about now]
Recently, our “worst nightmare” occurred with Ai (worst to date, in any case). The thing that all people who really don’t know anything about technology worry about: what happened when Ai gets a life of it’s own? What happens when AI takes over the world. Ok, that is not quit what happened, but the media is using the word “rogue”. As in, Ai went rogue. Yep.
Open AI was training a model, and despite it supposedly being in a sandbox (this would be considered an isolated environment with no access to the internet), managed to hack into a another technologically driven website (Hugging Face).
Personally, I think this is a pretty cool story. But it’s also an alarming one, too.
The problem I keep running in the background is how will AI change the future. In some ways this is less about AI, and more about how useless we are at truly imagining the future.
I have had lots of discussions with people about Ai, and the thing that strikes me most is how naive we are. We literally cannot conceive of how it’s going to change our future. We can only hold on to what we know, and try to expand on that.
But think about the internet.
We naively thought the internet was going to create this global village and bring cultures together. So much hope and optimism. How ironic. It has done the complete opposite.
The first internet bubble that popped once we couldn’t really figure out what to do with browser. So much money was being poured into the development of browsers, Netscape for instance, despite there being no clear business model. Investors were banking on an unknown future. I imagine that back then browsers was to the internet were the way visual operating systems were to the code driving our computers.
Browsers were being built with news feeds, and all kind of widgets, being a kind of one stop shop for what you might want on the internet. Until Google came along, stripped all that back, with just a logo and a search field and made finding other websites comprehensive and super fast. Because back then, things still took a long time to load. And we didn’t want to wait.
Then there was a short period where websites moved from being digital brochures to full on artistic experiences. And we still couldn’t conceive of what the internet would come to be, and how essential it is for our lives. Youtube came online, flash was making these amazing animated interactive experiences. Right up until twitter appeared on the side. Simple feeds. Information fast. Then grew the world of social media. And now attention media. And never mind all the porn. It is literally changing how we interact with each other and the world. And not for the better.
Sometimes I think, all we need to do is to think about is our base human traits, greed, laziness, exploitation, and then our base human needs in order to come up with how AI will influence the future. But that is looking at it in a vacuum. Quantum computing with it’s predictive lighting speed computing capabilities, is on the radar. Imagine that combined with AI, along with this latest news.
But that is naive too. Because inevitably, just like the pandemic, there are other things we haven’t consider yet.