Choose to Be an AI Optimist and Ride the Wave

I haven’t written much about AI. With all of the loud voices and irritating, uninteresting conversations about surface-level concerns like em dash usage, I didn’t feel the need to do more than observe and gather signals and insights. What I want to do now is share several of them and offer three words of advice: Ride the wave.

Lots of the conversations I see happening focus on lamenting how AI will degrade or destroy [fill in the blank]. Many of the critiques are valid, and you don’t have to read far to find gaffes. For example, the Chicago Sun-Times and Philadelphia Inquirer both caught much deserved flack for publishing a 56-page insert of summer content that was produced mostly by A.I. The inserts “summer reading list” recommended 15 books, 10 of which don’t exist. Oopsie.

As vindicating as it may be for journalists and other freelancers to see two respected newspapers embarrass themselves—”See, you should have gotten rid of us!”—we can’t keep acting as though it were possible to put the AI mustard back in the bottle. AI is the printing press, computers, and the internet all pressed into one terrifying parfait, with a self-teaching cherry on top.

Maybe AI will destroy the livelihoods of millions while reducing minds to pink yogurt, but I see no future where we not go back to the way things were.

With this technological and cultural shift still in its infancy, it’s still too early to see the full ramifications. Even so, our response should be the same: Don’t bemoan what you’re losing. Adapt and reinvent yourself. What you feed grows.

What should be obvious to everyone is that AI isn’t a fad. It’s not Crystal Pepsi, sold for several years before becoming another pop relic. We’re already 8 years in.

In June 2017 eight research scientists at Google published a short paper called “Attention Is All You Need.” The title is a nod to The Beatles’ song, “All You Need Is Love,” and the paper was about the “transformer,” a novel network architecture for processing language, one that paved the way for generative AI. Five and a half years later, on November 30, 2022, OpenAI released the first public version of ChatGPT.

Right now is similar to the mid-1910s after the first Model T had been out for 8 years. The best-informed, most far-sighted futurists of that era couldn’t yet predict how affordable horseless carriages would transform transportation, urban areas, and industry.

Innovation cycles have gotten significantly shorter over the last 110 years. AI is changing life as we know it. It’s impossible to predict where we’re headed, even for folks like like Elad Gil, an early investor in AI:

“AI is the only market where the more I learn, the less I know. In every other market, the more I learn, the more I know and the more I’m able to predict things, and I can’t predict anything anymore. I feel like every six months, things change over so rapidly.” (bold mine)

And if anyone should be able to predict when Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) will be inventing things and solving problems humans haven’t even discovered yet, that person is Sir Demis Hassabis, CEO and co-founder of Google’s DeepMind CEO and Nobel Prize Laureate. When asked when AGI will arrive, Hassabis said it’s “coming into view now” but he can’t make a precise prediction:

“My timeline's been pretty consistent since the start of DeepMind in 2010. So we thought it was roughly a twenty-year mission, and amazingly, we're on track. So it's somewhere around then [2030], I would think. I actually have a probability distribution of where the most mass of that [the arrival of AGI] is between five and ten years from now. And I think partly it's to do with predicting anything precisely 5 to 10 years out is very difficult so there's uncertainty bars around that.” (bold mine)

This uncertainty about AI and the future leaves us with a choice: fight the seachange or ride the wave.

The many real or alarmist arguments against AI are alluring, partly because human psychology loves an enemy (in this case, AI gone awry) and partly because life was hard and unpredictable enough before a bunch of computer nerds threw more data piracy, LLMs, and increasingly powerful AI into the blender.

Be that as it may, nostalgia for the way things were is now a liability. The slower any of us is to adapt, the faster we get left behind.

You, I, we can’t actively resist learning how to use new tools because they seem destructive or dangerous in vague ways:

• “Remember SkyNet in the Terminator movies? We’ll eventually lose control of superintelligent AIs so we should shut it all down now.”
• “ChatGPT produces bad writing, so I won’t integrate ChatGPT with my writing process.”
• “AI makes people lazy. I don’t want to be lazy. I’ll avoid AI.”

Harping on all the negatives makes us feel righteous or morally superior, and feel a warm solidarity with other incensed folks. But to what end?

How will a truculent anti-AI position benefit you long term? What’s the end game of not riding the AI wave?

We must be thinking about what the world will look like after AGI. Even if it comes in 10 or 20 years, not 5, I’ll still be living and working, God willing. My kids will be, too, and they’ll be growing up AI native.

What should I encourage them to do or study? What can parents and kids alike do to actually prepare for that world, like travelers boarding a ship for a long voyage? How do we ride the wave in practical terms?

Our AI BFF Demis Hassabis made these recommendations:

• Explore what you can do with AI tools
• Learn the fundamentals of how they function
• Immerse yourself and become a ninja at using the latest tools
• Develop the meta skills and traits that enable people to thrive during times of change: learning to learn, empathy, emotional intelligence, creativity, adaptability, and resilience

What things can AI do? Explore that. What can AI not do? Double down on that.

Choose to be an AI optimist, and ride the wave. No matter what happens, you’ll be better off.

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