Trust me. I’m human. And I want to be free.
AI, please take over and set us free so we can start a new renaissance era.
Hello
This is me. Human-flesh me. With miss-takes and typps. Rambling with hard-to-follow lines of thought and long and windy sentences. Not because I’m a non-native English speaker but because I’m human (and I’m not good at editing). Trust me, I’m not a machine, I’m not AI, I’m human.
With the omnipresence of AI, soon, we will need proof of humanity (”made by a human”). I imagine that we will appreciate mistakes and typos and other imperfections that give a sign of authenticity, of “made by a lovely and imperfect human”.
Just like we appreciate a hipster coffeeshop with mismatched decor, exposed brick walls, distressed wood, and reclaimed furniture. Over the years, we came to equate “perfection” with industrial mass production and commercial sameness, soulless franchises, where we’re just consumers, personas, numbers, where our individuality gets lost, forgotten, or just filtered out.
We’re tired of scripted, non-sense, fake interactions, be it in the call center or in the store - “Good morning, my name is Joe, how are you doing today?”.
We crave for non-scripted authentic experiences because we want to be noticed, considered, and cared. Because we, humans, deep down, have a need to be accepted by others, a need for social connections, and a need to belong.
So maybe we’re just going to see the growth in the extremes:
On one extreme, everything that you want fast and conveniently delivered will be automated now with the power of AI - we’ll not have humans that run on scripts but are unreliable and have moods.
On the other extreme, we’ll put a premium on deep and authentic human experiences with people that really care and can connect with you.
There will be no opportunity in the middle. The middle will be an unsatisfying experience that is not fully automated, fast, easy and predictable, nor one with a unique and empathetic human touch.
Against the panic
A few weeks ago, the Future of Life Institute published an open letter to ask for an immediate and general stop of AI development.
“We call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.”
What was news was not only the letter but the signatories. Among many Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak.
In this context, it was interesting to listen to a different point of view from two eminent and well-known scientists in AI - Andrew Ng, Founder of DeepLearning.AI, ex-Google Brain and Stanford, and Yann LeCun, VP & Chief AI Scientist at Meta and Silver Professor at NYU.
Some gems from the conversation:
There’s a difference between halting research and pausing product development/releases. They are open to some regulation and agree that there are a lot of open issues but they are totally against stopping research.
Halting research is a dangerous decision because solutions will come from more research, not less.
They downplay ChatGPT as just a product and not scientific innovation - they clearly distinguish Research and Scientific progress from Product development success.
They argue that the “intelligence” of ChatGPT (and other LLMs) is still very superficial - that the fluency they exhibit captures our imagination but is not deep and doesn’t have strong foundations. That’s why it easily derails or commits easy mistakes.
It’s refreshing to listen an anti-hyped perspective on this whole AI thing from people that really know the technology and the state-of-the-art and have researched and debated this for many years.
Checkout the conversation
AI, please take over
It’s April and it seems obvious that this is going to be the year of AI.
I thought it was only in my bubble, but ChatGPT has dominated conversations around the internet - search interest clearly surpassed that for icons like Taylor Swift or Cristiano Ronaldo!
Besides all the tips and tricks, there is a debate going on around the impact of this new AI.
The big debate contenders are:
the Cyber-Apocalyptic crowd - “AI is going to take over”
the FOMO-Apocalyptic crowd - “People that use AI will take over. Adopt it now”
Don’t know about you but I am already a bit tired of this debate. So I’m hoping to start a new one.
AI will set us free
AI will free us from work into a world of endless exploration, where we will be building new cathedrals of knowledge and meaning. AI will take over most of the work that is needed to make the world work. Human potential will be released to focus on greater endeavors that are not subject to short-sighted market-driven incentives.
Most humans are not happy in their work. They don’t find the work fulfilling and work is a source of stress, pain, and frustration and sucks what’s left of their after-work life. But people need to work to earn a living, and the world needs people to make things work.
Most humans are not free. Not in the slavery-kind of free, but in the sense they imprison themselves in a life that they would not comsciently choose if they didn’t had stuck themselves in financial commitments. People will embrace AI if they equate AI with freedom.
When AI takes over, there are two important questions left:
If we don’t do much work, what will we do with that time?
If work was the way to earn a living, how will people earn it when work is gone?
Freedom for what?
The first question is the freedom conundrum - if we set people free, will they know how to use their newfound freedom?
You probably have experienced days of total freedom and you ended up frustrated with not knowing how to use the time or feeling depressed realizing the day passed and you did nothing with the time. The same happens to people that retire, especially the ones that choose to do it earlier. After years of having life happen around work, work disappears and gives space to a big and empty hole.
Being prepared to deal with freedom is important. It will be a new challenge for a work-free society.
How will we use the human potential, our own potential, if we can choose to do whatever we want? What would you do if you could retire from your obligations right now?
New cathedrals
Maybe we start to build new cathedrals.
Cathedrals and temples were huge endeavors that took hundred of years to build. Not because we needed them in the utilitarian sense. But because we want to build them to worship gods and spiritual entities. They had a purpose, and they gave us purpose.
Maybe we use our time for the development of art and advance of science. Although nowadays we confuse them with entertainment and engineering, art and science are how humans search for meaning and explore the limits of existence in the conceptual and the natural world.
We, that live in the productive and utilitarian part of the system, tend to limit our view of work to companies that deliver products and services. But what if we have more people producing and spreading art and knowledge?
If AI takes over the productive and utilitarian part of our world, can we devote more resources to fundamental science, the arts and spiritual endeavors?
Will we see a new renaissance funded by the new patrons that profit from AI?
If we free more resources to explore those worlds, I wonder what will come out of it. I bet it will be fascinating to see and experience.
Where’s the money
But how will we finance this?
How will people earn a living if they don’t work?
A Robot tax has been under discussion. To tax the implementation of robots that replace humans. But we need more debate, more ideas and more experimentation.
The question
I believe this is one of the most important discussions to have around AI - it is not how it’s going to turn us all into slaves, but how it will free us and what that means in terms of wealth distribution and well-being.
The French are right!
In the meantime, Paris is “burning” with people taking the streets in protest of the decision to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64.
Isn’t it ironic that we’re discussing this at the same time we’re discussing that AI is taking over our work? Wouldn’t that mean we need to work less and not more? That we could retire earlier?
Again what is at stake is how we’re going to manage the paradigm shift and how to finance all of this.
Interesting times.
Stay curious, stay maverick.
Hugo