I remember my father telling me that people that believe too much in anything are hard to deal with. He was talking mainly about politics and religion, and what he meant was taking an extreme position makes someone dumb.
With my use of AI this year for my business and other things I get served the for and against sub-Reddits and I got to tell you these people prove my father’s point. The for subs are all full of bots talking to bots or people using AI to respond to bots also using AI. It is so weird to see a person ask for human advice for their AI business, get AI generated answers, and then start conversing with it like it is anything more than empty words.
The against sub-Reddits are just as bad. People renewing debates from 1917 on the nature of art or calling technology that has existed for decades AI. Then there is the fear that AI is taking jobs. I don’t recall many tears shed for Rochester when digital photography became the prevailing technology.
I am not saying we shouldn’t look to minimize the damage AI technology is causing, but we should try to understand it before being angry at it for things it isn’t doing. Look at how many technological innovations we have had and all of them have had different impacts.
Part of me is starting to think the thing we call AI is closer to a smart phone. It combined several existing technologies into one. It became a phone, a date planner, GPS, camera, Walkman, and much more. It took a bunch of different objects and made it one.
Computer generated graphics, music, automatic writing, and pretty much everything AI does has been around for a long time. It is just that now it is in one place and more easily accessed by the average person.
I am sure AI is going to have an impact on society. It already is, but the biggest concern should be the environmental impact more than anything else.
David Huzzard Writes 