What I'm Trying To Do Here (Redux)
Being a reintroduction of the point of this project after having maybe wandered too far afield in recent posts
I write this Substack for myself as much as I do for my modest audience (thought I appreciate each and every one of you!). When I write here I’m trying to work through what I think in public, to run ideas against the test of “is this thought through enough to post?” I’m doing that
When I started, I was clear about what I wanted to focus on: what it means to be human in a world knocking on the door of a revolution in artificial intelligence. In my haste to make sure I post here once a week I fear I’ve gotten away from that theme in recent months.
Time to correct. Time to refocus on what the point is here – the messy truth of what it means to be human, and how to raise humans, in a world of intelligent machines.
Where I Think We Are
We are at the start of a revolution in machine intelligence the likes of which the world has never seen. Already we have large language models capable of passing the bar exam, answering complex logic puzzles, coding, and writing an op-ed, press release, funding application or cover letter as well, or better, than most humans paid to do that work.
The technology doesn’t even need to get any better to change the world, it just needs to penetrate larger portions of the economy.
But here’s the thing: it is getting better, and it will get better than that. Will we achieve artificial general intelligence? Depends on how you want to define that term, but certainly we will live in a world with massively powerful artificial intelligences. In fact, we already do. The future is already here, as William Gibson once quipped, it just isn’t evenly distributed.
Where I think we’re going
It’s no surprise that the disruption I’m seeing is starting among independent consultants and small business owners. I know a freelancer who has trained GPTs on his clients websites and materials allowing him to turn out content for them in minutes with minimal editing. I had a small business owner pitch me on working with her to draft grant proposals in minutes and we’ve all seen scores of web articles illustrated with an AI generated graphic. I’ve done it hundreds of times myself.
This will continue. More middle of the road content coming out of GPT farms with a bland intro paragraph, two paragraphs of perfectly fine substance, followed by a concluding paragraph. You’re already seeing a lot of text generated in this way, even if you haven’t noticed yet.
And here’s the thing, it’s going to get worse. Before long Gmail will just write the email response to your boss on the budget question. And it will be… fine. Not the greatest email she’s ever read, but fine, and when you’re looking for an answer to a budget question, fine is fine.
There will be upsides as well. I already routinely use ChatGPT to learn about new subject areas and I’ve trained one to produce stories for my daughter, who has a reading disability. In the near future, it will be a tutor for her and scores of other children who need (or want) extra help.
Will we also use it to develop novel ways of deriving life saving drugs? Or explore the genetic makeup of cancer? I hope so. But my point is we don’t need it to be much better than it is today for it to revolutionize our lives.
What the future will value
Here’s my take. The next ten years will see a radical change in how we work, live, and raise our children. The changes will start online and in the job market. Larger and larger sections of the open internet will be overtaken by AI bots and become largely unusable. People will retreat to walled gardens and LLMs tailored to their needs and wants. We’ll have an intelligence explosion, but it will only be utilized by a few.
In the job market, employment which mediates mundane interactions with computer systems will continue to disappear – the AI will help you apply for your mortgage, always available and never distracted. Basic coding, writing and design will largely disappear with value being realized by people who can guide the robots to do things that are new, novel, and weird. Routinized shop floor labor will become rarer while bespoke complex manual labor (i.e. electricians) will become more valuable.
Which brings me, nearly 700 words in, to the guiding concept behind this Substack. What will the future reward?
In my estimation it will reward the obsessively curious and those willing to reinvent themselves not once, but two or three times, to address a rapidly changing world.
It will reward the weird, the human and the physical. Electricians will do well. Care workers will do well. And in the realm of the knowledge worker, those who can leverage rationality and creatively will do well.
That is what I will focus more on exploring here. I want to lean into my own weird, create my own little slice of the oddly human, and leverage that to explore what it means to live a fulfilling life, have a robust career, and raise kids in a world that is changing in front of our eyes.
I want a space to write about books and film and art. But also demographics and religion; sport and music. I want a space that is poorly branded and kinda all over the place. I want a place that is human, that is Sean.
Hope you’ll stick around.