My thoughts about the oncoming AI ‘revolution.’

(Note, I’m no longer going to do Two on Tuesday, I keep having difficulty limiting myself to two items)

I’m going to open the way I’ll end: I think the best things we’ll get from AI will not be AI itself, but its temperate and judicious use. The disciplined and conscientious consumers will be the true beneficiaries. This moment in history is not about AI. This moment is about you.

The future promises to be interesting, that’s for sure. Will it be good for us? Who knows. Thanks to AI and automation though, we are all about to get exactly what we want. This is how I envision the future, with some commentary about what I think it will mean, and who amongst us will benefit from this.

My predictions for the future:

My predictions are boring. I predict people will fly on planes. I predict cars will line the roads. I am not sure whether humans will be behind the wheel of these cars, but it seems likely that they won’t be. That will be for the best. What we lose in control we will get back tenfold as safety. The price of these cars will be very high. So it goes.

I predict that human beings will read books, and gossip about one another. I do not know what medium they will use to do this. I predict that people will fall in love and have babies. I predict they will worry about money. I predict that a large section of society will likely get fatter. I predict that we will suffer from over-medication, newly facilitated by automated diagnosis. 

I predict that advertising will get harder to resist. I predict that social media will get stickier. I predict the most addictive items that you would care about will control your feed. I predict this will all be algorithmically amplified, turned up to eleven. I predict that people will still feel lonely. I predict that some people will feel ignored and angry that society isn’t working for them.

I predict that we’ll likely still have Coca-Cola around. I predict that people will worry about presidential elections. I predict that young people, boys and girls, will worry about their position in society. I predict that people will have hopes and dreams and concerns growing up. I predict that cell phone addiction will continue to be a problem. I predict that cell phone addiction will accelerate to something truly out of all proportion. I predict life will keep going on, as it always has and always will.

My predictions are boring, because I think that even with new technology, we are the way we are because we got that way. We’re the children of a long evolutionary history that leaves us largely about the same as always. Which is another way to say “Ain’t much changing”

We have always run, face forward, towards a future with no hardship and no struggle. And the thing that we will end up hating most, when we really look at it, is a world where there is no hardship and no struggle. Take gyms. We have finally overcome the curse of hard work. Today you do not need to move if you never want to. Really.

And, due to that, our collective health has never been worse. We are paying people to hold spaces ready for us to come and do that which we explicitly strove as a society for centuries to not have to do. 

This is not only a physical problem. Mentally we face the same weird situation. Thought is expensive. The brain turns out to be the most expensive part of our body, calorically. Thought is so hard, we have become essentially heuristic machines, using shortcuts and rules of thumb so we don’t have to engage in the hard work of thinking. 

Now, this progression we went on, from hard to easy, is super easy to understand. And it’s hard to fight against. It’s so easy that it gives us the feeling of inevitability. I predict that there is a high possibility that the weaker among us will have our analytical abilities atrophied in a world of AI. In a world offering us ease, resistance eventually will fall by the wayside. Some won’t be able to resist the machine help in the future. It is understandable though. Once convenience comes, it’s hard to go back. Try and build a house or plan a wedding without google. It’s almost unthinkable. But people did it thousands and thousands of times before google was around. 

I predict that people that manage to hold on to their attention will be the new elite in the upcoming age. Those who have held onto their attention in the world of the smartphone. The physically fit in a world of obesity.

Those that can find ways to resist the siren call of the AI bots, helping us to make all our dreams come true, will be the best of us. Paradoxically, the ones that are capable of boredom will be much happier, stronger, and live longer. They will likely suffer from boredom less thanks to that too. This all feels so tragic too, for boredom is important. If we don’t embrace boredom, then we can’t handle slight stress. When we can’t handle slight stress, we can’t handle bigger difficulties. And when we can’t handle difficulties, then hope for improvement is gone. For then we can’t handle anything that might make us truly great.

I think the best things we’ll get from AI will not be AI itself, but its temperate and judicious use. The disciplined and conscientious consumers will be the true beneficiaries. This moment in history is not about AI. This moment is about you.