The Techbros behind AI keep saying Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) will replace people Real Soon Now, thus fewer people will be needed to run the world. (Maybe just a few Techbros.)
This may be the dumbest statement in the history of hype.
First, because AI will never be easy to implement. Problems must be defined, and results must be implemented, before anything good can happen. These are tasks for people, not machines.
Second, because there’s a difference between intelligence and autonomy. AI can’t get out of its container, whether the container is a cloud, a robot, or a car. Unlike people it can’t go beyond its own programming, and the database available to it. AI will always be bound by the constraints and limitations of its containers, thus by the people directing it. Techbros aren’t creating AI to get rid of Techbros.
In other words, AI is and always will be a tool that serves people. Like the PC revolution, which the present era resembles, or like the Internet revolution, of which our leaders have living memories of, AI is a tool for enhancing productivity and helping people get more done.
Where AI May Live
Just as the Internet was built on networks and computers that existed in the 1990s, AI will be built on today’s wireless networks and devices. The iPhone came out of that 1990s world and now our defines interfaces as the PC defined them in the 1990s.
As Om Malik correctly observes today, the “acqui-hire” of Jony Ive by Sam Altman’s OpenAI is another attempt to redefine devices for the AI world. PCs gave us windowing interfaces. Smartphones gave us app innovations. We need something new.
Where might AI live, and how might it live there? Could it be a little voice in your ear? Could it define what you see, like glasses? Where will its chips live? Can they fit in the device, or will they be in some box that goes in a shirt pocket? We need to get our heads up, out of our phones, to call what results progress.
Whatever we create next will be tied to the cloud, networked wirelessly. What value will it deliver when we’re outside the network? What will be its “airplane mode?” Will it have one?
AI devices are the new Holy Grail for AI researchers and AI companies. That’s because you’ll be tied to them, and to the companies behind them, just as you’re tied to either Apple or Android today. Which reminds me there’s no guarantee this new device, whatever it is, will originate in America. It could be Chinese.
Why This Matters
It will be Chinese. It will be American. There could be versions for every ethnicity or government, or perhaps even attitude toward government. Something must govern the software, lest its liberty become license.
Throwing money at this problem won’t solve it. The answer takes us back to the point I started with. AI is a tool, and we need new tools. My children’s generation needs new tools desperately, because they’re going to have to run this incredibly complex 21st century without us, soon enough.
