Let’s talk about…stuff – the kind of stuff you see in this image here – a ChatGPT-created caricature (if it can be called that) of me, drawing a picture of Li’l Bit, once sketched by me, then fleshed out (or…should I say, metaled out?) by ChatGPT.
We, the white-collar literate bourgeois, call it “collaborating” with AI. The point, Sirs and Ma’ams, is, collaborating to do what? To build an image that is good for my vanity (makes my eyes bigger, my smile less lop-sided-by-age)? All to push my flagging self-concept a notch higher? Because…these are the games that keep us focused on the wrong things.
In Game of Thrones, Olenna Tyrell (the matriarch of the Tyrell House) notes that games and festivals are organized by the powerful to keep people focused on the wrong things.
These little things – the entertainment peanuts, they keep us glued and grinning, like trained monkeys.
While…
- Amodei tells us that there’s a “risk” that Claude may be used for building chemical weapons and that the models are not incentivized to be honest about the risks (too much money riding on their growth).
- Mrinank Sharma, Anthropic’s AI-Safety Head resigns because he is concerned about the Perils of AI.
- Just yesterday, Indian IT stocks plunged because of AI-disruption fears (a reflection of the same fear in the US.)
- Some overtly positive posts tell us how the tip of the AI-competence iceberg hides a whole year’s worth of development under it – and how it can architect, code, and test an entire app without inputs from the developer.
What are we missing out on and why?
We choose to create our caricatures, mass-produce our SM posts, do our assignments, write our resumes – all using the free but old versions of the AI models, which don’t give us a real picture of the model’s real-time capabilities. The competencies that we ooh-and-ah about belong to older versions – and with the exponential growth of intelligence that these models are experiencing, we are not talking about capability addition, we are talking about capability multiplication, even exponentiation.
But we, you and I, are being asked by our companies to adapt to AI, or leave. Voluntarily. Nobody is forcing us out, you see?
So the question is: what do we do?
The first thing we, and I mean each of us, must do is… ask direct, no-fluff questions, and not settle for silence or even for veiled, weak answers. We need to get the conversations started – with our bosses, our staff, our big-bosses, our larger-than-life super-bosses. The truth is, they need us – the numbers, the middle-class, the AI-annotators now. As time goes on, they’ll need us less and less. For those playing the betting game…well, it’s a game.
Simultaneously, we need to train our critical thinking, curiosity, and creativity to make them stronger than ever before. So that we may pivot when needed.
Musk’s being realistic in scaling down his dreams from Mars to the Moon…and with the marriage of his AI company with his Space company, it’s possible that he’d be setting up the first human colony on Moon – but he isn’t sending out invitations to us for a lunar citizenship.
AI is not the ark. It is the storm.
We need to build our own ark. Let us start by asking a few questions.
- Are we being realistic when we think that if we adapt to AI, we’ll remain employable all our lives?
- Are we being realistic when we say that if AI does all the thinking, writing, and conceptualizing for us, we’ll be needed?
- Aren’t we, each of us, merely doing our bit toward handing over the keys of Earth to AI?
- Are we that short-sighted that we can’t see the damage that overuse of AI is inflicting on our brains?
- Aren’t we a wee bit curious about why all this is happening, and how this change is going to impact us?
- Is our curiosity and critical thinking already dead?
Because, hey, if we don’t care enough to answer these questions, then maybe we deserve all that’s coming to us.
You and I – the ones who aren’t at the helm, we are in the middle of the storm – and we don’t matter to the ones conjuring the storm. Recall that for Zeus and all other gods, humans were just pawns – a sort of entertainment, to be moved at their will.
Think about it, question it, talk about it, tell your family about it, prepare your children to face it – protect your mind and theirs with the ferocity of a mother tiger guarding her cubs.
Stay aware, stay curious, stay intelligent, and talk about it.
For the next few years, let us talk less about cuisines and dresses and music and dance – let’s talk about the fact that people who built AI and are still building it are exploding their lungs and saying, human existence might be in peril.
Now, some important screenshots made by our favorite AI: Google Gemini (The Search Assistant AI)
Ask yourself once again. Who do you trust (among the names listed below)? Them or the LinkedIn influencers who use AI to write their posts that talk about AI being the most democratizing invention since the Big Bang (which Eric Lerner believes might not have happened!)
- Nick Bostrom
- Eliezer Yudkowsky
- Toby Ord
- Max Tegmark
- Roman Yampolskiy
- Sam Altman
- Demis Hassabis
- Dario Amodei
- Elon Musk,Bill Gates
Think, question, talk, plan.
Written by: Shafali R. Anand
Graphics by: ChatGPT/Gemini Assistant
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