The Artificial Intelligence Juggernaut

Where is it taking us?

I find this sci-fi Salvador Dali-eque series, apparently created with MidJourney, to be particularly fascinating. If anyone knows what kinds of prompts are required to generate images such as these, please send me a message and share the secrets with me!

Like many of you, I am field-testing the latest AI. The sudden explosion in AI’s artistic and textual abilities is mind-boggling. While I find the aesthetics of the Lensa self-portraits hideous, I am dazzled by the images that MidJourney can instantly punch out. I receive such eloquent responses when I ask for poems and short essays on quite esoteric subjects¹² from OpenAI GPT-3s Large Language Model (LLM) that I already feel threatened, destabilized. I am guessing many of you feel the same? 

Across the Internet, people realize that the capabilities of the latest AI platforms represent something new: A seismic shift in technology. Some pundits proclaim it as big as the invention of email, or the birth of the Internet itself. I hear that GPT-4 is exponentially more powerful than the current LLM. Perhaps we are lucky it won’t be released for another year, so we have time to prepare. 

I don’t know about you, but I feel the need for a deeper context to frame what is happening. I turned to two books for answers (still looking for other recommendations). The first is The Age of AI and Our Human Future by Eric Schmidt (former head of Google and Alpabet), Henry Kissinger (99 years old but still ticking) and Daniel P. Huttenlocher (MIT Dean of Computer Science). The second is The Atlas of AI by Kate Crawford, researcher at Microsoft Research and founder of The AI Now Institute at NYU. While the book by the three esteemed white males was quite generic and uninspired, I found Crawford’s book a great, provocative read. She provides a slew of useful ideas and a meta-level context. 

For Schmidt, Kissinger, and Huttenlocher, AI is an unstoppable paradigm-buster that will plunge us into a shocking new world – perhaps the most significant technological advance since the printing press, and one that also brings with it deep philosophical challenges: 

Only very rarely have we encountered a technology that challenged our prevailing modes of explaining and ordering the world. But AI promises to transform all realms of human experience… The last time human consciousness was changed significantly — the Enlightenment — the transformation occurred because new technology engendered new philosophical insights, which, in turn, were spread by the technology (in the form of the printing press). In our period, new technology has been developed, but remains in need of a guiding philosophy.

As one delves deeper into The Age of AI, it is clear the authors do not have a “guiding philosophy” to offer us, just a slew of very disturbing questions: “When intangible software acquires logical capabilities and, as a result, assumes social roles once considered exclusively human… we must ask ourselves: How will AI’s evolution affect human perception, cognition, and interaction? What will AI’s impact be on our culture, our concept of humanity, and, in the end, our history?”