ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE UPHEAVAL
I can’t get artificial intelligence out of my head. This morning an opinion piece in the New York Times on artificial intelligence only amplified the urgency of understanding the effects of artificial intelligence in order to be ready for what is coming, for preparing for the time that artificial intelligence to transforms everything.
But, of course, I don’t have a clue about what is coming next. I do have things that I wonder about. But thirty years ago no one in Swannanoa guessed that the computer was going to wipe out the textile factories in the Swannanoa valley and North Carolina or that the Internet was going to multiple sources of information, real or fake, and threaten local newspapers or that the computer would completely upend the way we shop and have goods delivered. No one foresaw GPS or a portable phone with a camera in everyone’s pocket or streaming movies and books and music or the multiplicity of tv channels. We were blind and were blindsided by all these changes. No one was at fault, we were all clueless.
So how am I supposed to get ready for the AI deluge? We couldn’t prepare for the Swannanoa River washing out Swannanoa because experience told us what to expect and it turned out that our experience was no guide. Our experience is even less useful for the coming AI deluge when everything will be dislocated including white collar jobs, manufacturing, housing, transportation, politics and who knows what else. It will be a rocky ride for all of us. The Elon Musks who pioneer this will get fabulously rich as they are already doing. We might find an arrangement that lets all of us benefit or we may not. A huge number of us could be left out. If I don’t know how to position myself, I have no idea how the Indian villagers or slum dwellers will affected, but I expect they will be left out completely. Manual laborers worldwide will be left out it would seem to me. And yet with AI it could be that there would be such a rapid increase in production that everyone in the world could live simply and decently with a lifetime of learning and freedom to enjoy our leisure time.
About the fears that AI could just take over and run the world disregarding or dominating humans I am clueless, and am not going to worry about now. But this other dislocating upheaval by artificial intelligence is sure to come, yet I don’t know how to prepare.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 