AI is so inescapable that you wonder why you even took the day off. It’s not just that there are countless chatbots and generative models to choose from, but also that the arrival and proliferation of this rapidly growing and changing technology is like an earworm that the everyday consumer can’t get rid of.
The relentless pressure of artificial intelligence is as catchy as HelloOutkast’s driving song from the early 2000s that helped perpetuate the myth that you have to shake a Polaroid picture to develop it. And Polaroid photos are actually a lot like AI, they don’t need any help going from blank and blurry to sharp, clear, high contrast and specific.
The topic of AI follows me everywhere. Since I work with technology for a living, everyone wants to talk to me about it. At work, where I write about it and often experiment with different generative models to test their limits, that’s understandable. But now the AI chatter follows me home too.
AI Starter
Recently, I was at a friend’s house, where more than half a dozen schoolmates gathered, people I’ve known for literally decades. As we stood around, drinking beverages (I had water) and eating cheese and crunchy snacks, a friend started casually asking me about AI.
As a bank employee, she knew how artificial intelligence could be used in the workplace, but she was concerned with more personal and serious questions. When would artificial intelligence take over? When would we become too attached to it? When could we love a robot?
We talked about all of these topics in detail for about 30 minutes. I explained that one of the reasons it was so difficult to predict the future path of AI was because most AI model developments, including for the best AI chatbots, had broken the technology’s traditional 18-month development cycle and even Moore’s Law, which states that the number of transistors on a chip would double every two years, essentially doubling the computing power.
However, AI is amorphous and expansive. I challenge you to find the beginning, the middle, or the end. It is a vast corpus of possibilities stretching in all directions.
AI models, on the other hand, evolve at a pace of three to six months, and advances in intelligence and performance often appear to occur more than twice as fast during these time periods.
The more we talked, the more uncomfortable I became, and that was weird. I’m usually the rationalizer. I take difficult technical concepts and explain them to friends and family (and sometimes to TV audiences). What seems scary or incomprehensible usually isn’t. Technology—or even most devices—can be confusing when viewed as a whole. But breaking them down into their parts or tasks makes the picture clearer and easier to understand. Plus, most technology has a beginning, middle, and end. It’s a standalone smartphone, your computer, or even a VR headset. Software extends capabilities but doesn’t necessarily change them in fundamental ways.
However, AI is amorphous and expansive. I challenge you to find the beginning, the middle, or the end. It is a vast corpus of possibilities stretching in all directions.
Unjust punishments
What also worried me in our chat was that I couldn’t reassure them. I couldn’t convince them that AI wouldn’t take over certain tasks (simple typing tasks, money and account management, customer service). I couldn’t find an argument that we would never love an AI.
On this last topic, I went down a rabbit hole where humans are basically complex biological machines and the only difference between us and a robot with an AI brain is the level of complexity. While AI can currently only mimic human emotions, who’s to say that in a decade (or less) it won’t actually have something close to them?
I remembered that iRobot CEO Colin Angle once told me that C-3PO-style robots were decades or more away and we shouldn’t expect anything like that before 2050. But I realized we hadn’t spoken in a while and that with the advent of generative AI, he might think differently. I told her about Future.AI and its new robot, Future 02. Sure, it couldn’t walk well, but its upper body and hands could move expressively and OpenAI’s large language models gave it a sort of personality.
Conversations with AI chatbots are not uncommon these days, and in recent months they have shown alarming signs of humanity. There’s a back-and-forth, I told my friend, that was previously only possible with another person. She seemed intrigued and more than a little alarmed.
We agreed that the concern wasn’t necessarily about us. We would (hopefully) be old and rickety when AI took full control. The concern was about our children.
She remembered once telling her child that she could love anyone she wanted, except a robot. “That was a joke,” she began, “… and now it’s not a robot,” I added.
I left the discussion feeling quite unsettled.
As the evening came to an end, my friend told another of our friends how we had chatted about AI and “Lance helped me feel better.” The other friend asked, “Really?”
“No,” she laughed, “no, he didn’t.”
