These are some of my thoughts and ideas on AI after working with these technologies during the past couple of years.
I’d like to start with people first as its the power that be that first thought of, expanded on and finally created these technologies that we call ai today. Ai was created by the human mind and its touch, with all its imaginary, creative and thinking powers, first and foremost. There’s always been humanity behind the creation of ai every step of the way, from its initial inception, to its training on vast stores of human created artifacts, to its use within all aspects of human knowledge work, like software, finance, office work, etc… Humanity is the foundation and the bedrock for this technology, its creation and its uses. Ai captures these instances of human creation and is able to make interesting and novel connections, it can compile existing information into easily digestible outlines of knowledge that would take the individual hours or days to gather by himself, and it can also create based on this ingested data. The technology itself is an amazing tool that speeds up creation and helps to flesh out an idea into reality.
What I saw at the beginning of the introduction of ai tools was a genuine curiosity of the technology and what it could do. People were excited and shared with each other new ideas, features, and interesting ways that the technology could be used. This enthusiasm continued for me until certain expectations were placed on the company as a whole. There was a sudden internal shift with a sense that we were full steams ahead with trying to become an autonomous ai first company. With this, everyone was expected to use ai tools in their day to day job. The change was subtle to start, we were already using these tools day to day but the inversion of principle that eventually occurred was vastly more important as time would show. Ai was in the service of the individual, but this was no longer the case. WE were now in the service of the ai. This was very evident based in the changes to company culture and work expectations. It was “faster now, more now, more pr’s, more progress and more productivity”, people were now being pushed to go as fast as the ai tools could keep up with them.
Here is my warning, ai must always be regulated and put under the use of powers that are bigger and higher than it, namely those of the good of humanity. My other warning is this, humanity must NOT be put under powers, ideas and environments that undermine it since they will atrophy and degenerate the ingenuity, and the creative powers that lives inside each and every one of us. We live in a fundamentally organic, living and interconnected world of whose interrelatedness we can hardly imagine or have even scratched the surface of. Ai CANNOT capture or mimic these living systems and living interactions between people and the whole of their environment and world. Ai is a photo and a snapshot in time that forgoes the colorful, rich and dynamic life of those within the photo, it is a dead and static thing by itself.
At its introduction within a company ai arrives as a blank slate, ready to ingest and learn, but one has to imagine that every single PR, every design document, every question, and slack discussion within the company helps to expand its repertoire on company knowledge, its nuances, quirks, design choices and infrastructure, until at last after a year and some time, its so well versed on internal company knowledge that it can displace X amount of people within the company. The ai at this point is a snapshot, a colorful one of course, but nonetheless you will still need people left at the company to help propel it forward and onward to new things. My prediction for these ai first companies that puts its people in second place is this. Those within the company will help propel ai and the company vision forward with genuine imagination and creativity for a time, but with the harrowing and degenerative forces of an ai first approach, the individuals within them will finally succumb and be retrofitted and made into living breathing neural nodes within this devouring company neural network, the individual will have been relegated to a catalyst of sorts. (Think of DOGE’s, Nvidia, and Blocks policies of every employee sending the CEO a weekly status report, each employee being a node of sorts, to be consumed and distilled out as a data point by ai, used and shared only with upper management) The company will have mineralized at this point without any new human impetus being injected into it, driven only and completely by its leaders and its ‘shareholders’. The company will stand there as a shadow and a statue of its former self.
The same applies to an individuals over reliance on ai, you cannot have these tools think, plan, imagine and create for you. Ai is the whole human collective consciousness condensed into a silicate and mineral strata and the result of an individuals over use of these technologies will be to be plunged into that human collective consciousness. A dim haze will start to surround a persons ‘I’ that will short sight and blind the ego aspect within us. All our actions, personality and being will become the averaging out of whatever the training the ai has gone through and WHAT the creators of the ai have chosen for it to be trained on.
- Hi chatgpt, I feel like so and so, what should I do?
- Hi claude, what should I do about this situation with this person?
- Hi claude, how should I go about building this thing?
- Hi chat, should I do this option or that option, why?
What do YOU want to do? Ai should only be used as a tool to help sharpen and bring focus to our own ideas, our thoughts, and actions.
The Industrial Revolution showed us that a persons worth is not in the dexterous work of our hands, machines could the same things faster, more consistently and with higher quality. Now the ai revolution is showing us that, in the same manner, our worth cannot be quantified by us being a subject matter expert at our company or by being really good at leet code or memorizing the penal code. Ai can do the same thing faster and quicker and have the entirety of a knowledge base accessible to all. Where does ones worth lie if not in these things then? Though these question have been answered times innumerable by our ancestors, traditions, and religions of old, I think they will yet be asked again by some of our modern knowledge workers in the coming times ahead. The silver lining in all these changes is that it gives us the pause, the push and the opportunity to ask these questions to ourselves. During this same time frame as that of the ai revolution we’ve seen higher profile studies on consciousness, what it is, on whether certain animals have it or not, and whether ai can achieve it too, it seems like modernity scrambling to grasp at that next special aspect of humanity that makes us truly special.
There’s other items to unpack here but we can leave off with this. All of the streams of life and the world’s creationary forces have squeezed and condensed into a singular point, and this is you. No one else like you has ever come before nor will ever exist again in the whole history of the universe. We each have a hand in creating and shaping the future of this world, through our actions, thoughts, beliefs and expectations in the most realest sense. So nurture and sow within yourselves the seeds of a good and hopeful future, and so will you reap.