May 14th Newsletter
A thought: Find peace in a sea of chaos by doing what you can today and trusting that’s enough.
The popular take on AI is that it’s dangerous.
I don’t really want to comment on whether AI will become sentient and “decide” to release chlorine gas and kill us all. I don’t know and I can’t do anything about it.
I am interested in whether AI is dangerous to our ability to govern ourselves.
It’s not debatable that social media has destabilized society. Give people a way to connect with each other and they’ll do dumb people stuff. They might attack the Capitol or commit mass atrocities or get together to plan mass shooter events. People do dumb things and new groups of people, enabled by Meta products, will also do dumb things.
AI is less dangerous in some of the ways that social media is dangerous. If you give people a tool that is uniquely tailored to them, their own personal assistant, they might try to win over the personal assistant. Well good news, the AI already wants to win you over.
I see the destabilizing effects of AI on society in more of an individual way, people getting weird with the AI, rather than creating large violent mobs.
Certainly that’s a problem. But if you asked me to choose between people getting an AI buddy and people chasing likes on social media, I would choose the AI buddy.
I don’t think that people have fully internalized that AI will be the way we access everything. It’s already happening.
The internet will progressively become databases that the AI pings to gather information. Will you need a website if everyone can just ask their personal AI buddy and get a good summary?
Things will get even weirder as the AI becomes more enabled to do things on the internet.
Instead of searching for the best hotels site, then booking something, then booking your plane tickets, then booking reservations at a park, you’ll ask the AI to put together an agenda, you’ll provide feedback, then it will go grab all your reservations while you do something else.
If you sit with this for a minute, you’ll realize the current way of doing internet is increasingly a relic.
The internet will become the domain of the AI agents. We can go back to living in the real world, maybe.
I heard someone say that you learn the value of technology when it stops being cool. I mostly agree with the sentiment but I’d change it slightly.
Things can be buzzy and new, generate a lot of hype without being valuable.
New is of limited value. New wears off.
Things that are actually cool last.
Standing the test of time is cool.
And things that solve problems for people are what makes them stand the test of time.
No one likes chasing the new thing, it’s exhausting. Everyone loves things that solve real problems for them.