If you feel your brain start to pretzel up inside your skull, then you are getting the full experience of the generative-AI revolution barging into your industry. This is what disruption actually feels like. It’s chaotic. It’s rushed. You’re told it’s an exhilarating moment, full of opportunity, even if what that means in practice is not quite clear.
Nobody knows what’s coming next. Generative-AI companies have built tools that, although popular and nominally useful in boosting productivity, are but a dim shadow of the ultimate goal of constructing a human-level intelligence. And yet they are exceedingly well funded, aggressive, and capable of leveraging a breathless hype cycle to amass power and charge head-on into any industry they please with the express purpose of making themselves central players….After roughly two years of the most recent wave of AI hype, all that is clear is that these companies do not need to build Skynet to be destructive.
AI is eating the world is meant, by the technology’s champions, as a triumphant, exciting phrase. But that is not the only way to interpret it. One can read it menacingly, as a battle cry of rapid, forceful colonization. Lately, I’ve been hearing it with a tone of resignation, the kind that accompanies shrugged shoulders and forced hands. Left unsaid is what happens to the raw material—the food—after it’s consumed and digested, its nutrients extracted. We don’t say it aloud, but we know what it becomes. Charlie Warzell in the Atlantic.
Luckily we have an effective, highly functional political system run by astute, well-informed grownups that have the vigilance and wisdom to protect the public interest.