We need to talk about AI…
I don’t want to be an alarmist, but if you haven’t been following AI closely, there’s something very important I think you should know. Recently, AI has turned a corner. What the future holds is unclear, but what is clear is that a lot of things we take for granted are going to change. COVID-19 provides a helpful analogy here. In the very early days of COVID, I felt a bit like I was going crazy due to my view of reality
Splintering from almost everyone else’s. I was starting to be convinced it may become a global pandemic, and yet people weren’t acting as though it was a big deal. Even the stock market had only just started to react. In late February 2020, I decided to write publicly about it, proposing it was time to at least consider preparing for COVID. I got some serious pushback from people at the time saying I was being alarmist. In retrospect though, I’m glad I posted
About it when I did, which is why I’m saying this to you now. It’s bizarre to me now seeing so many takes about how AI technology has hit a wall or isn’t that impressive or is just a stochastic parrot or is merely next token prediction. I often see people laughing at AI making dumb mistakes and therefore writing off the technology as though it’s useless. Sometimes these confused takes come from people who have only played with the free versions of the AI
Offerings. These versions are far inferior to the paid ones. So, while these people’s reactions are understandable, they don’t reflect the true state of the technology. Still, other people form these skeptical takes on AI as a reaction to the overclaiming that happened. And yes, there’s a lot of overclaiming and hype, but an overclaim about one aspect of a technology doesn’t mean that another aspect isn’t incredibly powerful and moving fast. AI is in a bizarre state of being
Simultaneously one of the most overhyped and underhyped technologies. Cutting through what’s hype and what’s not could be very challenging. Of course, no matter how much you hate AI or tech companies, that doesn’t determine anything about the true state of the technology. All of these skeptical takes about AI are distracting many people from the important reality. The best way I know of to make you aware of what’s really going on is to tell you about what’s different now compared to roughly
A year and a half ago. One, AI went from making mathematical mistakes that a high schooler might not make to solving research math problems that at least a few serious mathematicians had attempted but not yet solved. AI is going to change the way mathematics is practiced. Though it is of course not now a replacement for professional mathematicians. I’m actually a mathematician by background. I have my PhD in math and I’ve already been using AI to check some moderately
Complex math problems that come up in my work. And it sometimes finds errors or important assumptions that I missed. Here’s what The Atlantic wrote in conversation with Terrence Tao, one of the world’s greatest living mathematicians. The first time we spoke in the fall of 2024, Tao had likened chatbots to mediocre but not completely incompetent graduate students. But during our most recent conversation, he was more bullish. Chatbots are at a point where they can collaborate with human mathematicians. The technology is
Opening up a different way of doing mathematics. According to Tao, in the short term, we’re going to get a lot of quick wins on easy problems from pure AI methods. And then over the next months, I think we’re going to have all kinds of hybrid human AI contributions. Two, it went from struggling with engaging in complex reasoning to producing quality critiques of essays and academic papers, including often being able to find significant factual errors and logical
Flaws in people’s work. Three, AI went from frequently hallucinating false information on simple topics. You may have seen this less than helpful suggestion for how to keep your cheese from sliding off your pizza. To being able to combine built-in knowledge from the LLM training process with hundreds of automatically conducted internet searches to prepare mostly accurate reports on complex topics in just 20 minutes. These would normally take a person multiple hours and sometimes days of work to produce. For example, here’s
The beginning of a report that I had Deep Research generate about the psychological study of power posing, the idea that your body posture might influence your feelings of power, risk-taking, and cortisol levels. I’ve confirmed on areas that I do know a lot about that these are typically reasonably accurate. And I’ve used them on areas I don’t know much about to learn quickly. Four, AI has gone from producing photo-like and art-like images to being able to produce images that the
Majority of people can’t distinguish from real photographs or real art made by professional artists. Take a careful look at these four images of still lifes. Can you tell which of these was painted by a 19th century painter and which was made by an AI in a few minutes? I’ll give you a hint. At least one was human painted and at least one was made by AI. Can you tell which? My Twitter audience couldn’t. They got it
Completely backwards. I already know of people who’ve lost their graphic design jobs and been replaced by AI image generation. Five, AI has gone from producing music-like sound to producing music that people don’t realize is AI generated. It’s already getting a large listenership on Spotify. The amount of AI music that’s going to be produced will likely be staggering with substantial impacts in the music industry. And honestly, by playing around with this technology for a couple of hours, I was able to make two full
Songs that I really enjoy listening to. I’m not saying they’re good songs or that I have any musical taste, but I do think the technology has crossed the threshold. The way this technology works is by training on lots and lots of real music. But at least as US copyright is concerned right now, it seems that most of this AI music is actually legal as long as it doesn’t sound too similar to any existing songs. Six, AI has gone from producing highly
Questionable medical advice to producing some types of medical analysis on par with doctors when provided with the same patient information. At least as evaluated by some metrics of quality. These AIs are not at the point of replacing doctors, but the best of them are now very useful in helping you understand your medical condition and even giving you questions and treatment possibilities to raise with your doctor. Seven, from producing glitchy proof-of-concept, but often uncanny valley video clips, to producing
Segments of video that are being included in professional commercials. For some reason, Will Smith eating spaghetti has become a standard way to look at video progress with AI. We don’t seem to be that far away from AI being used with in the end movies. Eight, AI has gone from doing badly at many types of IQ test problems to being able to solve most types of non-visual IQ test problems at a performance level above that of the average person. Nine, AI has
Gone from providing a handy auto-complete for programmers to coding entire apps, websites, and data analyses based only on English language descriptions and subsequent feedback from non-programmers. A number of top tech companies now have more than 70% of their code written by AI. An almost unbelievably fast shift from a mere 4 months ago. I myself have been using Claude Code to do some coding projects that I never previously could make time for. And I was able to create them
Completely and get them working well without writing a single line of code. And I was able to complete them in less than a tenth of the time compared to if I coded them myself. I’m not saying that AI can do everything that a software engineer can do. It can’t. But software engineering as a profession is never going to be the same again. I also want to be clear, I’m not saying that the best AIs today make no mistakes. They
Absolutely make mistakes. And AI work often needs checking. But they make a lot fewer than they did 18 months ago. And if you think AI making mistakes renders it useless, then you haven’t experienced what it’s capable of. I’m also not saying there couldn’t be a market crash due to excessive AI investment. If AI fundraising gets too far ahead of company revenues for too long, a market crash related to AI is possible, even if the technology is
Extremely powerful. The reality is, even if we were to freeze AI tech at its current state, it would have substantial impacts on business, work, and our day-to-day lives. In such a case, it might take years for all these changes to percolate and for the impacts to reach an equilibrium in society. But, we are not in this situation. This is a technology in rapid motion. Difficult as it is to swallow, this is the least effective this technology will ever be.
The changes I described represent what’s happened within roughly the past 18 months. So, what is the next 18 months going to look like? Nobody knows. But, barring some catastrophe, AI will be more powerful in every one of the domains I mentioned, and it will continue advancing in domains I didn’t even touch on. AI development may one day hit a wall, but it hasn’t happened yet. Like the splitting of the atom, which can be used to produce abundant
Energy or wage nuclear war, AI is an extremely mixed technology. It has the potential to make things substantially better, for instance, by making high-quality information even easier to find, by making education far more personalized, by making quality medical advice much more accessible, and by enabling people to create things they’ve always dreamed of but never been able to before. But, at the same time, AI carries the potential to cause tremendous harm across many different axes, from misinformation and
Manipulation to scams to slop to authoritarianism to job loss to energy and resource use to increased inequality, and perhaps even to threaten human civilization itself. To understand these concerns better, you can take a look at the study we conducted, where we asked people to evaluate how concerned they were about 16 different AI risks. These issues, both the concerns about the technology and its potential, are such a big deal that I think it’s worth being aware of what’s going on. We’re
Now in the era of AI and it’s an era of great uncertainty. The error bars on its impacts are in my view incredibly large. I know that what I’m saying here, if you believe it, can be nerve-racking for some people and create a lot of uncertainty. So, what can or should you do? Well, honestly, it’s tough to say, but I have a few pieces of advice for whatever they’re worth. Suggestion one, use. If you are not ethically opposed to
Using AI, a position certainly understand, start experimenting with how you can use it to genuinely improve the quality of your work. However, note that this easily can go wrong. It’s important to steer clear of producing AI slop, of automating aspects of your work that shouldn’t be automated, and of sucking the soul or authenticity out of your work. Consider using Anthropic as your AI, since as far as I’ve been able to tell from the information I’ve seen so
Far, they’re the most ethical of the AI development companies, but they’ve still managed to stay on the bleeding edge. I give this advice because I believe it’s better to be riding the tidal wave than to be swept up by it. On the other hand, if you’re ethically opposed to using AI, that’s also a valid choice. Suggestion two, information. Learn about how AI technology works, at least the basics to help you understand it, and stay up on
What’s happening AI, but in a way that’s deliberate and not overwhelming. There’s so much mere noise about AI every day and so much overclaiming and hype that it can be easy to get stuck into time-wasting misleading rabbit holes. And at the same time, there’s so much negative sentiment and doomerism, it can be easy to fall into anxiety spirals. There’s a limit to how much AI news is useful and past that point, it’s a waste of your time or worse than a waste of
Time. I think a good way to navigate this is to find a few reliable sources of AI information that don’t produce excessive output and that focus on important aspects. Then simply follow those while avoiding other AI news. The useful sources might be newsletters, media sites, podcasts, or YouTube channels. Consider following a mix of practical sources addressing questions like, “How does it work? How might it impact your area you work in? How can you use AI effectively? What’s now just
Becoming possible?” as well as sources that discuss the societal implications in a nuanced way. Consider a mix of different types of sources. If you have any recommendations for sources like this, please put them in the comments. I also occasionally put out podcast episodes about AI on the Clearer Thinking Podcast, usually focused on societal or philosophical questions that AI raises. I also have a recent episode about the predicted economic and job loss effects of AI with an economist who
Specializes in this topic. I also have an episode where I interview Ilya Sutskever, one of the co-founders of OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT. Suggestion three. If you can, avoid going into a new career or job that is in the process of major AI disruption. I don’t think now is a good time to become a graphic designer or translator. I recommend spending some time thinking about how your job or career is likely to be impacted by current AI technology. Once
You understand what AI is capable of, ask, “What will it look like when AI technology is widely adopted in my field? And what would it likely accelerate, partially automate, fully automate, or make unnecessary?” I recommend starting with the current AI technology because that’s already a challenging set of questions to ask yourself without having to speculate about future changes in the technology. But, once you’ve done that first set of questions, it’s worth asking yourself additional questions. Suppose in the
Next 18 months AI makes as much progress as it has in the past 18 months. How might that shift work in your career or job further? Suggestion four, personal projects. It may be that those projects, whether creative, fun, or entrepreneurial, that you’ve always dreamed of doing, but never did due to a lack of time or missing skills, are now far more doable with the use of AI. Consider trying them now, or if they’re still not feasible, in a year when the
Technology is even more powerful. I’ve already done two projects like this that realistically I just wouldn’t have done were it not for AI making it so much easier, and I was really pleased to have done them. But, this needs to be done thoughtfully, because using AI can sometimes undermine the meaning or expression or authenticity involved in the project. If you enjoy painting, then asking an AI to make a painting for you is not going to serve the same purpose
Or scratch the original itch. But, if you’ve been really wanting to do some personal project, but you’re blocked by some technical hurdle, AI may be able to help you get over that hurdle. Or, if there’s a little app you’ve always wanted to make for some purpose, you may be able to make it now with Vibe coding and get it working. If you’re concerned about the impact of AI, whether pragmatic or existential, follow the work of some of the great nonprofits
Aiming to help protect from this technology’s danger and downsides, and consider channeling your concern into supporting them, whether with donations of money or time. You can also consider reaching out to your elected officials, telling them you’re concerned about this technology, and you want them to focus on it. If you have other advice for what people should do to navigate the shockwave that’s coming from AI, please post it in the comments below. Or, if you think I’m being alarmist or wrong
About something here, please tell me why or what I got wrong. And if you’re wondering, this script was written without AI, except for use of a spelling and grammar checker. If you found this interesting, I’d really appreciate it if you subscribe. Every week we put out a video on all kinds of topics about psychology, philosophy, society, and AI. In the description box below, you can find podcast episodes where I deep dived with experts on AI.
Mhm.