Tom has had an AI revelation as his last. three. posts. have shown. I’m in agreement that the world is definitively changing. Some people are embracing it full-on, some are tuning it out, and some are outright denying it. Regardless, none of that will stop it from nestling into every facet of life over the next few decades. I’ll put a note here to AI 2027, which I’ll go into more detail about below, but in case you don’t make it that far it’s worth checking out if the topic interests you.

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Tom’s posts have been more short-term; How will it affect our business? What is ‘original’ content? Is a blog post fundamentally different if I sit and write it versus if Chat GPT produced it and I ‘edit’ it? What happens when anyone can produce expert level content on every subject?

These are the natural first instincts & questions one comes to when confronted with the onslaught of AI generated content. Specifically Tom’s reply to a comment on his most recent post saying “Once you know it’s AI, it does seem to water down the material.” strikes me, because I feel the same way… for now.

I’ve consumed a lot of (human generated) content in the past few years about the future of AI, and come at it from a slightly different angle. To me, the AI revolution is 100% inevitable. Whether it happens in our lifetime, I do not know (though I think it will), but these current feelings we have – AI content feels icky, music wouldn’t be as good without the soul of the human artists no matter how catchy, a fully AI movie would be just weird – will not last.

With the speed we’re going at, the intelligence explosion is not far away, and before long, an AI will know you better than you know yourself. It will do a better job at picking your career, picking your spouse, and picking the movie you want to watch, than you will ever do. It will even know if you’re gay well before you do. I remember talking to someone about an AI picking a spouse, and they said they didn’t want the “perfect” partner, that you need some conflict in a relationship! Agreed! And you know what will know exactly how much conflict you prefer in a relationship? The AI.

It’s a cheat code. What’s the fun is discussing whether human music or AI music is better when my answer will simply be “The AI will know exactly what you want to hear“, and when you throw in some caveat that you like music that makes slightly uncomfortable sometimes, I’ll say the AI will be perfectly calibrated to that. But that’s the road we’re heading down. For a period of time, maybe even a generation or two, people will hold out or push back, but in the coming centuries, if we survive, no one would ever NOT use the AI to build their perfect life.

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AI 2027

AI 2027 is a thoroughly thought-out blog post by humans that play out a possible future. The primary author was a former employee at OpenAI and quit because he feels they’re heading down a very dangerous path.

Primarily, it explains how AIs will begin to accelerate, how even current day AIs are showing clear signs of deception, and ultimately how AIs will become self-improving to the point that humans won’t even understand how they work. The AI Arms Race dynamic however, will mean that companies / countries will forge ahead regardless because if they don’t develop AGI first, then someone (China, another company, etc) will. They predict this all by, you guessed it, 2027 (though he does specify that’s an extremely aggressive timeline).

It’s a bleak painting of the not-far-off future from people very knowledgeable on the inner-workings of these companies as well as the AIs themselves.

Clearly I began with a rosy picture that AI will be perfect and make everyone’s life undeniably better. This is the other scenario; that it ends humankind as we know it. Personally, I say it’s 50/50 that I live until the end of my life without AI directly or indirectly killing me first. It’s quite possible we’re living in the most consequential century in the history of the earth.

All of that said, I’m embracing its use-cases and will live my day-to-day life as humans have for the last hundred thousand years – just trying to make the best of the situation I’m in.