These lines are extremely difficult for me to write because I awareness akin digging my own grave. AI systems are improving by leaps and bounds. From the first 2022 fumbling publish of ChatGPT, which couldn’t correctly figure the figure of a’s in my name (it claimed two), we reached OpenAI’s release of math papers where an inner AI model solved many hundreds of earlier open math problems. Aside from philosophical arguments, practical claims concerning the superiority of individual thought, on evidence specified as hallucinations or bias, increasingly appear to me akin rearguard defence. For the bulk of today’s cognitive work, the writing’s on the wall: AI volition obtain over.
The three factors driving AI’s control in the contemporary activity environment are improved performance, lesser cost, and higher availability. The achievement of AI models is rising spectacularly on all fronts: perception, cognition handling and creation, reasoning, judgement, and autonomous action. In parallel, individual proficiency in key information-processing skills, low on average among adults, is even declining among students. Consequently, AI systems are performing improved than humans in ever-wider range of tasks.
AI’s disbursal is additionally falling because of huge investments and specialized progress. Successive generations of AI models recommendation better achievement at lesser cost, with older models retained lone for backward compatibility. As a result, it is making financial awareness to substitute or augment individual labour with AI systems throughout an increasingly broad range of activities.
Finally, and most obviously, AI systems can run about the clock, without the need for remainder or breaks. They can additionally assistance alleviate labor shortages arising from demographic trends or skills gaps. Meanwhile, trillions of dollars in projected data centre investment through 2030 are set to bring huge additional AI handling capability online.
As happened in former scientific revolutions, there volition undoubtedly be fierce resistance to the replacement of cognitive activity alongside AI. This period it volition be fiercer because, dissimilar former revolutions, which transformed manual labour, AI challenges cognition workers, whose specialised expertise, authority complete information, and decision-making authority oversee them greater economic and organisational power. Governments volition try to clip AI’s wings through regulation and taxation. Such actions didn’t quell former revolutions so there’s small logic to accept they’ll activity now.
So what’s the destiny of individual thought? My obtain is that cognitive activity volition diminish. Thought volition increasingly rotate into a leisure pursuit, as hunting did following animal domestication, calligraphy following typography, woodworking following industrialisation, and horse riding following motorisation. Machines transformed much of bodily action from necessity into choice; similarly, AI volition decouple individual thinking from its financial purpose.
I’ll end alongside my thoughts on how to prepared for and live through this transition. My obtain is that building this AI-driven world, riding through the bumps alongside the road, and preparing to live a fulfilling and satisfying existence in an environment anywhere AI dominates cognitive activity will be hugely demanding, stressful, and intellectually challenging. Such is the nature of revolutions. Consequently, we must keep gait alongside and capitalise on AI’s advances; be flexible, adaptable, and resilient; and build a purposeful and rewarding existence beyond work. My difficulty onward is to move from making a living by thinking, to making thinking part of a existence value living.
