Speculating about the future with AI

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Apparently the first time JRR Tolkien used a tape recorder, he (semi-seriously) recorded himself praying the Lord’s Prayer in Gothic to exorcise any demons that might be inhabiting a machine that is capable of speaking on its own. He then proceeded to make some quite wonderful recordings of readings from The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Better safe than sorry!

There’s been a lot of talk about AI over the past year because of recent impressive progress in the development of text- and image-generating AIs. A lot has been related to long-term doom stuff, but since I have no control over potentially inevitable future doom, that doesn’t seem worth bothering about.¹ There’s also been discussion about how current AI actually works since nobody really knows (weird glitch-prompts related to archetypes??), which is more interesting but mostly over my head. Anyway, in the shorter term I think it would be interesting to consider what effects AI will have over the next decade or two, since that will actually be relevant to decisions I might be making right now. Given how fast things changed over the course of the past year, I’m sure they’ll continue to change fast. Any predictions will inevitably be wrong, but I think it would be interesting to make some broad ones and look back later to see how they fared.

I’ve recently heard a couple people express (semi-serious) concern that using ChatGPT will make people forget how to think. Although the bot’s eagerness to provide ready-served and comprehensive answers could perhaps result in a lapse of critical thinking, I feel like we tend not appreciate how much we’ve already been offloading our thinking to AI in some contexts.