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Unlike many people, I am definitely on the AI-train: this is a revolutionary technology that will transform the way we live. I do think that people and companies that learn to make use of this technology most effectively will gain compounding benefits over time, just like how it seems households that has a computer 30-40 years ago (either through wealthy parents and/or educated parents) really helped prepare their children for big and better things (although obviously having wealthy and/or educated parents already help a lot too).
If one looks at the AI Index of Ramp (corporate spend management platform), one will find that in monthly AI spend, the top 1% of companies are now hovering close to $10k/month/employee, with a big drop off that follows where top 10% of companies are only spending $800/month/employee, and the median company is only spending $15.70/month/employee. In short, being AI-pilled shows up on the balance sheets. In an interview with Derek Thompson (btw, the other author of Abundance) on his podcast Plain English, Ramp's lead economist Ara Kharazian says: "All of the companies in that top 1% are extremely technically advanced. They are concentrated in the information sector, so software and media or finance or technical services." I do believe these companies are on to something, these are evidentially smart collective of people with clear objectives (increase productivity, reduce cost, maximize profit, etc.)
On a personal level, after 1 year ish of using Claude/Codex as a software engineer, I've noticed many benefits of AI usage (though . I've shared before that it has freed up time, for example, to engage with this forum. I've also been on and know of multiple projects with which would have never even been greenlit if not for AI-use, such as integrating with an external partner on a legacy platform in a computer language no one in my company knows (tbf, it is a C-family language). There has been many complaints about software reliability in the AI-era, with one poster child being GitHub that got bad enough where prominent projects left for supposedly greener pastures. My company did the opposite in that we are migrating from Atlassian's bitbucket to github, I think in part because of what I summed up in an internal message at the time when asked of should we or not: "a migration to GitHub is essentially a bet on AI, because Microsoft/GitHub for sure will be at the frontier of AI features compared to Atlassian/Bitbucket." Regarding the perception of reduced software reliability in the AI-era, I fondly remember early Q2 this year, when the VP of Support and Operations came to my team and the CEO to complain about the increasing amount of outages; I sat down for about a day, counting up number of changes-features-fixes per release and number of incidents caused by each release before presenting to everyone in a meeting my findings: the rate of errors (number of incident / number of changes-features-fixes) actually reduced per release, but because we were releasing so often due to increased cadence and productivity, the raw number of errors increased. The aforementioned VP btw has come to learn to appreciate AI a lot, even if he doesn't quite understand the terminal still.
This brings me to the thread down low between @RandomRanger and @MaiqTheTrue which provoked this chain of thought, bolded mine:
I found a source for the stat btw.
Why is there more stress and suffering now that would lead to the tripling of teenage suicides? Ask the random person on the street, they'll just point everywhere and tell you to look around and say: "everything is so hard now". I think what is so hard about life in the US, and I guess the modern age, is complexity. Life these days are too complext. It's simple enough (heh) to look at computers as a technology that drives societal complexity. Computers makes certain problems extremely simple ("find the 25th, 50th, and 75th percentile using this column of data in Excel"), but then it leads to new problems that are more complex ("now that we know the 25th, 50th, and 75th percentile, what does that mean to us?"). Fifty years ago, it was simple enough to understand your own finances, at most you had a bank account, paper checks for the monthly payments on car and your house, and pay in cash for everything else. Now consumers look at managing multiple credit cards, point rewards and loyalty programs for various companies, managing their own IRA/401K/brokerage, etc. Fifty years ago, you marry the person you met in school or the person you met at work, now gotta navigate dating apps, hookup culture, shifting and varied interpersonal relationship expectations, etc. The following statement from @FCfromSSC points to it well:
And of course btw, complexity is a subsidy for the rich, because only the rich can afford to navigate all the complexities.
So what will AI do to/for us? Personally again, I think AI has greatly simplified my life. There are many questions that I wouldn't even know where to begin to ask, now I just ask. But a colleague has recently confided in me that he thinks of quitting before the year ends, "the rate at which we're going, it's just too fast". I was perplexed at that because I thought AI would have made his life easier like AI did mine. But maybe it wont? what do you think?
I think an under-acknowledged challenge of AI is that it will dramatically increase the opacity of systems that everyday people use. There are already reports that much of Gen Z and especially Gen Alpha are computer illiterate, likely due to the prevalence of mobile operating systems that do everything they can to obscure technical details from the user. Actual illiteracy also appears to be increasing. I wouldn't be surprised if something like a "knowledge oligarchy" emerges, where the vast majority of the populace is captured by hyper-addictive entertainment technologies, leaving a small group of people who actually know How Things Work.
"Knowledge oligarchy" implies the people who know How Things Work will be better off than the ones who don't. That's true now and it will be for a while longer, but mature AI simply renders human intelligence obsolete. The computer is faster than you and smarter than you and way cheaper than you; you simply won't be able to compete, and even trying means wasting effort that could have gone into... whatever does matter in this new world. Social status games, probably.
Like, the vast majority of people used to be involved in agriculture. Over the past couple centuries there's been a precipitous drop in general farming acumen. So is there now a 'farmer oligarchy?' Not even close. In fact, the skill set of the people who do farm is enormously different from the farmers of the past -- the only people keeping that tradition alive are irrelevant hobbyists and idealogues.
So, yes, systems will become more opaque to humans trying to understand them personally, but why would you ever do that? In practice they'll be much more transparent, because you'll just ask your own AI to figure it out for you.
I’m skeptical, because intelligence includes just knowing what to ask the AI or dealing with whatever it inflicts on you.
It’s true that in an AI dystopia, intelligence won’t stop you from being tortured or gunned down by an AI drone, but this is true today and was true s/drone/barbarian/ millennia ago.
Those who have any opportunity, intelligence still matters. And the only way everyone will have zero opportunity is if AI kills us all. Even if it fully provides for you, there’s still opportunity in self-actualization (which includes things like, figuring out your favorite food) that I doubt ASI can completely provide. And even if it can self-actualize you, even if it can fully simulate and predict your brain, then you still have “intelligence” in every meaningful way, just simulated by the AI (in the same way we could be or not be living in a perfect simulation, but it doesn’t matter because it doesn’t change anything).
Well sure, human intelligence is only obsolete to the extent artificial intelligence is available as a replacement. There are scenarios where it's not that widely available, but I don't think they're very likely (possibly besides AI killing us all). As we transition to a bread-and-circuses model for keeping the useless masses content (which we probably will because it will be cheaper and less risky than other approaches once AI drives the marginal cost of labor down far enough), direct AI access provides good bang-for-the-buck.
In terms of self actualization: people can self-actualize by doing things inefficiently -- say, playing chess without an engine -- but that doesn't make it not-inefficient. When I say 'obsolete' I mean 'devoid of instrumental purpose,' not necessarily any purpose. Though I suppose playing chess well without an engine, while not high-status in any absolute sense, is certainly higher status than playing it well with one, so maybe that is a flaw in my definition or reasoning.
Human intelligence is valuable even with artificial intelligence, unless it's practically omniscient, because intelligence includes the ability to prompt the LLM correctly. Even if it's perfectly aligned, unless it's practically omniscient, it can't know what you truly want, part of self-actualization, you must figure that out on your own.
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