The following is part statement, part warning, part hopeful call to action, and mostly my thinking aloud on the topic of AI.

Hello, I hope you’re having a nice day.

It seems the drive of humans to innovate and iteratively improve our technology is more of an inexorable march for our species rather than a quirk or byproduct of our society.

As we’ve seen with technologies past, from stone tools, to steam engines, to now LLMs, our improvements have the power to permeate, affect, and hopefully improve the lives of everyone on earth.

It seems likely that AI, in many different domains, will eventually begin to surpass the capabilities of humans. Much like it has with Chess, Go, etc. so it will progress on to more complex tasks and activities.

Whether AI will be able to surpass humans in all domains remains to be seen, but it certainly will become a cheaper alternative to human labor.

When a business owner or entity has the socially sanctioned goal of profit maximization while simultaneously having access to a labor pool or component that doesn’t need to sleep, or be paid a living wage, and can handle much more throughput than human counterparts; they are quite likely to make the change.

Some claim that AI will create new jobs for humans, as technological progress has done in the past. We have seen such a shift in our recent history as machines have taken on more and more of the manufacturing processes that once were fully human-centric. In turn, freeing humans up to move into more knowledge work that wasn’t underpinned by how much we could lift, sew, weld, grow, etc.

However, what happens to the “pressure relief valve” occupations when an AI exceeds the intelligence and therefore capabilities of an expert human in this domain? In what other arenas besides manual labor and knowledge work do we have to compete in? Paired with robot bodies, wouldn’t these intelligent AIs also be stronger, faster, smarter, and generally more efficient than humans at nearly every task?

Or, phrased another way, since the invention of the internal combustion engine, how many times have you relied on a horse for your transportation needs?

…

I believe the best we can hope for, as a species, is a smooth transition into a world populated with such AIs.

A world where we don’t need to work to survive, where our sense of worth doesn’t come from our status or incomes, where innovation makes resources and benefits abundant and easily shared.

It’s hard to envision such a world in the distance, peering through the haze of the one we live in now, and many may not agree on what it should look like, what each of us should do in order to guarantee it’s creation, and whether or not we should even be allowing activities that bring us closer to it.

While I can’t claim to know the future, how soon it will arrive, or what it will hold, I do know that it’s coming, and inexorably so.

Each one of our daily choices shape and change that future, sometimes without meaning to, and in ways we didn’t intend.

As best as I can tell, there’s only one thing we can reliably strive for.

Let’s try our best to build and encourage the building of a future we’d all like to live in.