Its been a year now since ChatGPT came and you still have not been told to pack up and leave.
This is because in my view it is most likely not going to happen like that. Let the hype calm down. Remember crypto, remember NFT, remember Decentralized Finance. Not as big I know but lets stick with the hype theme here.
All the above have clear merits and areas of innovation. But we must recognise the hype train and its passengers many of whom are not truly invested in this topic or understand it fully. I actually spent most of 2023 trying to ignore this hype cycle because I didn't really feel anyone really knew what the outcome of Generative AI would end up being in terms of a near term use case. I still think this is vague for many yet still immensely interesting a development. We are into something big, but leveraging it correctly is key.
What we do know is that AI can act as a worker, essentially be deployed into workloads by us. However we tend to often presume AI will rise up as an immediate threat to our place in the world. This dystopian image I feel is a super fast forward. Why not enjoy the immediate value before descending into Orwellian chaos that may not ever materialise.
Energy Consumption
The first thing to remember is that AI requires huge sums of energy to be smart. It will always be its weakness. The human body hosts the human brain requiring reasonable levels of food and water to operate as a highly efficient self maintaining super computer. It is a reasonable player in carrying out energy intense calculations. Switch this to computers and there is a reason your Microsoft Azure bill skyrockets when you invoke its AI services. It costs money and energy. So this disadvantage provides humans with leverage, for now at least. To counter this though AI can stack to be immensely smarter than us quite quickly, but not for free. The world does not consist of finite energy resources even with the sun shining all day in many parts of the world.
So this on its own provides a symbiotic relationship between us and computers. We can of course hand over the keys to everything but what primary energy source might they use to allow full autonomy can only be imagined at best.
In the meantime lets put AI to good use. Machine labor is what has catapulted us to the level we are currently at. AI will indeed do the same. But! Computers will face the exact same renewable energy challenges we humans have. Finite energy will in fact provide the governance computers need to embrace the symbiotic relationship that will make a hopeful human and AI marriage possible.
Design workloads, show your employer how AI saved you time, automated, helped you imagine. It is overwhelming and easy to get caught up in, but look at tomorrow not next century first I feel. Computers makes modern life great in many ways and creates endless opportunities for us all. Perhaps lets stop the talk of eventual dictatorship.
