A.I. and you
An Ink reader forum
There are days when I think the A.I. revolution is overhyped. Yes, it will be big, and things will change, but life is life and people are people, our problems and our virtues have shown remarkable consistency over millennia of upheaval. This, too, shall pass.
And then there are other days I look around and have the feeling of watching one of those videos taken 27 seconds before a tsunami washes over a small town in Japan. I sit on the subway in New York and look across at human beings and then up at all the advertisements hawking human irrelevance. What will these people — me, you, and everyone else — do? What happens to people who are not needed? When the richest people in the world are beginning to call for tax relief for poor people, you sense we may be on the cusp of a world without work for most people — an apocalypse with the unusual characterstic of being totally optional. We should call it “A. Why?”, perhaps.
We’re going to be thinking more and more about the social and political and cultural questions raised by A.I. in this newsletter. And as we do, I wanted to begin with you.
Here launches a reader forum in which we want to hear your thoughts about A.I. — your fears, your optimism, your experiences.
In the spirit of all our subscriber forums, I expect this to be a place of genuine inquiry and exchange, no meanness, only curiosity.
How have you encountered A.I. up close in recent years, and how has it shaped your point of view?
What questions do you most wonder about — perhaps questions we can pursue here?
Are you more like me on the days when you think this, too, will be just another thing? Or are you persuaded of the this-changes-everything-forever story?
Do you have unusual use cases — medical needs, eldercare — that perhaps give you a different perspective from the mainstream?
What do you think is missing from the larger national conversation based on what you see where you are?
This is not a story that can trickle down from on high. It’s a story about a collective choice — many collective choices — we are making and will continue to make.
Tell us how you’re thinking about it all:
What I notice most in the AI conversation is that the so called leaders in this revolution cannot clearly articulate the destination we are going to end up at. There is no clear vision from them while others are noting possible apocalyptic ones. It’s like those who are starting to drive the bus just want to start driving and hope we end up somewhere better. The scary part for me is that they really might not care because they have a perspective that their wealth, interest and power will keep them from suffering the same harms as the rest of us.
A quick off the cuff response: as a recent NYTimes article on an AI High School noted, a lot of what is being labelled as "AI" has been around for a while and... this is the key takeaway: the parents loved the TEACHERS at the school more than they loved the TECHNOLOGY at the school. As long as humans have agency over the technology, there is nothing to fear...
That said, there IS something to fear about AI... for example, it is not hard to imagine a search engine being captured and marketed widely by MAGA and presenting the "World-according-to-Project-2025" as truth and omitting everything else, sort of a combination of Truth Social and Google... and who might underwrite such a search engine? I'll let readers' imaginations take it from here....