Ai's Capacity for Self-improvement Is Unprecedented
One very common reaction to AI right now seems to be dismissiveness.
"Eh, I've played with it, and it's cool and I can see a lot of great uses for it, but it's not going to change things the way everyone thinks. And it'll never be better at my job than me."
This mindset is drawing on past experience. Which, in every other experience in life, this is literally how we function, so it makes sense.
What must be understood is that AI is not like any technology we've ever seen before.
AI's capacity for self-improvement is unprecedented.
Y'all we're used to technology that releases, and if it's a Big Deal, then that one thing impacts us in some way - sometimes a Big Way - and then doesn't dramatically change for a while. All of the following had a significant impact on the world, and then that impact plateaued:
📺 Televisions
🏧 ATMs
🍿 Microwaves
📱 iPhones
Or, sometimes their impact is amazing, plateaus, and is replaced by something else - like VCRs to DVDs to streaming video. Sorry, Blockbuster.🎺
That's not the case here. AI's usefulness right now is in its infancy.
We're about to hit the toddler era, which will be just as much fun as it sounds like. People implementing AI into all the things, often badly, to the point where we wonder why we had kids in the first place. ... errr AI. AI. Yes.
But UNLIKE every other experience ever, AI is going to* continue to accelerate in growth.
(*I hate predictive statements like this about the future. Particularly as someone into Astrology, there's always room for a "or, it might..." ... but in the case of AI I'm willing to put my money on the thing that looks like a 99.9% probability...)
The "toddler era" may last months or years. I'd wager that "years" will show up primarily in people's implementation of AI, vs the AI itself. Though if the AI accelerates fast enough, it can help people fix their screaming toddler implementation and grow that isht up a little bit.
Then we'll hit the sweet spot ... "age" 6-11 or so, where AI is asking great questions, gaining insightful knowledge, and is even willing to help with the dishes.
Angry teenager will probably be about the time we stumble into AGI "artificial general intelligence", where its intellectual capabilities generally match that of a human). I can't begin to guess how this will go. Drama? Yup. What kind of drama? Couldn't tell you.
And after that ... we just don't know. There's no way to know what Adult-AI ("ASI," or artificial superintelligence) will do, I don't think. The whole definition of it is that it's surpassed us in its cognitive skills and ability to reason and "think," so how could we know what that will be like. 🤷 This is why I say please and thank you now to ChatGPT - be nice to the baby, be the aunt that it thinks of fondly and maybe doesn't strike down in the apocalypse. I'm kidding. I think. Please and thank you.
There's no way to predict the timeline of this, but what we do know is that we're on course for this path right now. Could be months, a year, a decade. Before the summer of 2022, half of AI experts believed AGI would happen before 2061. Metaculus (not AI experts, but experts at forecasting) forecasts AGI will be around by 2040. And that was in November 2022. Median right now is at 2032.
I'm willing to bet money that it's sooner, because it's hard to guess at where you are on an exponential curve when you're used to thinking linearly.*
So.
The impact of AI is far from over.
ChatGPT's capabilities are a starting point, not a finish line.
**And. There are paths where none of this happens. Maybe we never get to AGI - there are certain ways that basic "common sense" elements of human thinking are actually really difficult to produce in AI. But I have an inkling that AI is going to help us crack the code to get to AGI. I also believe that "AI" could hover just outside of "AGI" and not fully make that next step, and still be absolutely transformative for humanity. How exactly, 🤷.
Please and thank you.