If there’s one thing that tends to repeat over the course of history, it’s that humans are never satisfied. The yearning for more has pushed us to innovate, but it has also caused massive issues. As Blaise Pascal put it in Pensées, “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
There’s another quote attributed to Einstein (not sure if it’s true),“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” What’s left unsaid is that whatever new solutions we come up with will also create new problems we can’t imagine, i.e. unintended consequences.
I’m thinking about this in the context of AI. The core ideas around AI are 1) humans are costly, 2) AI can do it fast, cheap, and reliable. Lots of work are manual and unpleasant in nature–AI can take that away. But if this idea is taken to the extreme, that humans are to be avoided at all cost, that everything should be available immediately and without effort, I do think we have a huge problem: we lose touch of what it means to human. That life is messy, the relationship are messy, that figuring out a path forward amid uncertainty is part of the growth experience.
The people who develop the AI have much to gain of course. Imagine a world where they have unfettered access to data, where their products and solutions would replace jobs done by billions of people today. That level of consolidation of powerful is incredibly lucrative. Sure, AI will become like the augmentation tool to enhance human ability, but there will also be huge collateral damage along the way. Also, it will raise the important question: What does it mean to be human?