AI

Is it good? Is it bad? Is it neither good nor bad? What is it? Does it matter what the label is? Are these questions an LLM can answer so we don’t have to use our cognitive energy thinking about them? Yes to all? Who knows? Do the answers even matter in the grand scheme of things? Anyway, that’s a lot of very deep questions for you to prime your brain with. So here’s my opinion—just kidding, I really don’t have much of a stance on this. I just know that we are all expected to have and share some kind of opinion to appease the algorithms out there that are already somewhat intelligent and love people writing about tech trends. So here goes nothing….

Pros:

This is just another form of technology that is promised to not only make the rich even richer but also to make our lives easier. What could possibly go wrong?! Reid Hoffman has been hyping up AI for the last 10 years, so I know at least one person is excited about it. What could happen? The utopia, if you will... we enter a more lax culture where automations are superpowered. All the things you spend time toiling over become intelligent. Here are a few things that could become much easier:

Managing a household:

• Cooking, cleaning, repairing, turning lights off, locking doors, etc.

All of these things have been promised in various forms, like smart cookers to smart fridges that tell you when things are going to expire to apps that tell you what micronutrients you are lacking in your diet. Imagine if this was all embedded into a marketplace (cough cough, AMAZON) that may or may not be heavily invested in an AI company called Anthropic. Hmmmm, interesting. Maybe they could make everything—from buying items and delivering them to powering robots—possible. (Yes, there is a Black Mirror episode for all of these things.)

Healthcare and wellness:

• Checkups, remote psychiatric care, image analysis (cancer or abnormality detection), nutrition, fitness plans, wearable analysis of biometrics, brain health, and procedures.

This is obviously a heavily regulated space and much more challenging, but there’s huge potential for AI to assist in areas with staffing shortages. This is incredibly important, especially in the US where healthcare is not accessible and affordable for everyone. If we could reduce costs for hospitals and insurance companies, we could give more access to other communities through these automations. This is a huge unlock but would require massive work to adhere to regulations and compliance, and may even require some of our current rules to be amended or reformed.

• Climate change:

  This is my personal favorite since it impacts everyone—though maybe not equally (please read Good Economics for Hard Times, an absolutely fantastic book that describes how people closer to the equator and/or lower-income countries are disproportionately impacted by climate change due to lack of access to air-conditioned buildings and the increase in temperature relative to higher-income countries like the US). I digress, but this is another huge unlock. AI could potentially use our abundant data and tools to further refine how we can address climate change. We could create more dynamic and optimized systems that utilize or create the largest carbon footprints. There could be dynamic pricing models and carbon taxing models using AI to generate data. We could even optimize individual lifestyles (this was a question I got when I interviewed with Google). My idea was that everyone had a wearable, like a watch, that tracked your daily activities, measured your carbon footprint, and suggested ways to reduce it. Sort of like a gamified Fitbit but for carbon reduction. Now that this technology is more accessible, it’s much more possible than before when it was mostly siloed within large organizations like Google using products like TensorFlow and training your own models (sorry, totally geeking out here).

  My point is that there’s a huge opportunity to optimize how we spend our finite time on Earth and to rebuild and repair the communities and parts of the Earth humankind has neglected.

Cons:

Jobs will be lost:

This is already happening at a high rate. Not only will jobs be lost entirely, but jobs will also change dramatically. Some investors gaslight and say this has happened every time there’s been a new technology, like the internet killing print media. Okay, but this isn’t the internet. This is automation of entire market sectors like commercial art, writing, or any field AI can perform moderately well. This is probably the most dramatic shift from a new technology we’ve ever seen. I don’t want everyone to freak out, but it is a concern. My recommendation to anyone who feels this fear, like I do, is to familiarize yourself with the technology. This cognitive bias causes us to fear the unfamiliar, so becoming familiar with it will reduce your fear and anxiety. Also, using it helps train the model based on diverse data, leading to less biased outcomes.

Models will be biased:

Models are currently trained on the information they have access to, meaning they’ll be biased because not everything in our heads is documented on the internet. The most polarizing perspectives get into the training data, while the middle ground is neglected. This is why I am sharing this blog: I want my voice out there, not just to train models but to show people they shouldn’t be afraid to share their thoughts. We need as many people using AI as possible to keep the models as unbiased as possible from a consumer perspective. We can’t control closed systems like OpenAI’s, but there are transparent open-source LLMs like Meta’s Llama that may align more with your philosophy. Until regulators catch up, it’s on us users to help train the models and use the ones that are more open.

Economic impacts:

There could also be downstream impacts on the economy at large, affecting businesses that don’t adopt the technology and get outperformed by incumbents. This generally happens during any major technological shift, like when mobile phones absorbed a huge market share of games with the iPhone’s release. But this technology is moving faster because it’s easy to set up and use, and it literally learns from itself at a blistering pace. Imagine a room of people listening to a lecture, but they’re also teaching each other different subjects simultaneously—that’s what large neural networks and deep learning models are doing. This exponential intelligence growth could require the government to step in and create a minimum basic income to mitigate the catastrophic impacts on jobs and businesses.

Deep breath. That was a lot, so take a moment to be present and take the steps you need to get through this very odd period of time. See all my other posts about mental health and wellness for more on this topic. This is why I hate talking about this stuff, but I feel it needs to be shared. You are not alone in feeling lost and overwhelmed (and this is coming from someone who’s known about AI for the last 10 years and has worked in tech with various ML models in games and ad tech).

My Parting Advice:

Everyone should use AI a little each week to familiarize themselves with it. Pick a fun app that will help you with your life in some way.

Fun things I’ve done that are easy:

• Give it a list of items you have in your fridge, and ask it to suggest a meal plan for the week with constraints like only using one pot or cooking for no longer than 20 minutes.

• Ask for feedback on something and for detailed next steps on how to improve. This is a great hack to find easy ways to build on a skill.

• Give it a complex form or document and ask it to explain it like you are 5 years old.

• Pay attention to what your company is doing with AI and make sure you are joining those conversations and training events.

Hedge your bets:

For me, this means investing in something extremely analog, like pottery. For you, it could be hiking, botany, or growing your own veggies.

This means doing something professional or personal that has a low probability of being impacted by AI.

We should all be preparing to either be AI facilitators (prompt engineers) or pivot careers. Think about what this may be so you aren’t caught in a reactionary state at the end of this cycle.