Watching Harari’s interview with The Economist.
He is a very smart guy, and has been trying to warn us. I am wondering why people are so sure that he is wrong. Why we keep insisting that AI is nothing more than a fancy word-prediction model in a fancy new app.
It seems to me that business and academia have decided to embrace AI with open arms, in a kind of trance, like children celebrating the comic start to a horror movie. But we are supposed to be adults. Why are we doing that? Is it laziness? Or is it that education has become little more than teaching students to make money by running calculations that AI can now run for them?
If education were about thinking, AI would not really change what we do. It would just give us a better opponent. That we reached instead for the labor savings says something about what we thought the job was.
When did society make a conscious, deliberate decision about its stance on AI. Or did tech become so powerful that we lost all agency and now the AI tsunami carries us whether we like it or not.
Too many questions for a Tuesday night. Let me go ask my best friend Claudia Anthropius what I should think. She will probably agree with me, which is exactly the problem.