In short: the terms of what it is like to be a human are about to change in ways that rival the transformations of the Enlightenment or the Industrial Revolution, only much more quickly.
The enormous opportunities and terrifying challenges associated with AI, some of which are likely to materialize in the next three to five years, don’t just matter to a venture capital firm or the owner of a cornfield being turned into a data center. Our experiences as citizens, consumers, parents, employees, students, and more, will soon go through their biggest changes in generations. Each facet of life will become very different—and the biggest difference of all is that this time, the changes will play out not over the course of generations but rather in less time than it takes an American student to complete high school.
The coming policy battles won’t be over whether to be “for” or “against” AI. It is developing swiftly no matter what. What we can do is take steps to ensure that it leads to more abundant prosperity and safety rather than deprivation and danger. Whether it does one or the other is, at its core, not a technology problem but a social and political problem. And that means it’s up to us.
(by Pete Buttigieg)
Posted by modooff
3 Comments
AI is an overblown technology and it’s ability to replace a human is hugely overestimated.
Reminds of of Bitcoin. It does have some useful utility, but is significant overstated.
Politics makes even smart people spout vague, equivocal pablum on every topic. I’m sure Pete has precise and interesting thoughts on AI. Not sure we’ll ever hear them.
It would be nice if our next president had a basic understanding of “neural networks” vs “machine learning” vs “large language models”.
Especially now that palantir and openAI are embedded in the military.