Argument: AI will have a positive impact on societies because it will lead to people learning the right thing and amount in order to do anything.
AI will set a bar for people below which performance will not be tolerated and so all the people will quickly adapt to being at least at the bar.
This would have implications beyond the efficacy of performing a task. For example, I have been an avid user of AI for over a year now. I use it for work, research, improving my messages, coding and automating tasks like writing a document for research work I want to remember or refer back to.
After communicating with AI I started getting a hang of the right way to prompt the AI to get the result I’m looking for. I realize now that AI performs a lot better when we make our intention absolutely clear and if we communicate that in the right manner. This has had a positive impact on how I communicate with people for work or otherwise. I find myself just intuitively knowing the right words to communicate without having to think about it. And I attribute a part of this to learning how to communicate and think better as a direct result of communicating with AI a lot to do tasks for me which I would otherwise do myself.
I’m not sure if this makes sense to you yet but for me it has led to doing things more properly and communicating clearly and concisely.
So who knows? Maybe other people will have this experience too and be influenced by AI in a similar manner. Surely, prompting an AI to do a task changes our role from being someone who performs a certain number of steps to produce an outcome and then has to judge the work against a standard of some sort before handing it over to whoever needs to see it to being a person who needs to communicate clearly what needs to be done and then judges it and makes changes if necessary. This I believe has led to me thinking about the task I’m doing more comprehensively and also look at the task from a more meta perspective leading to me understanding it better and how it can be optimized to have various effects leading to more experimentation and hopefully improvement.
So we will likely be forced to be better drivers, artists, writers, programmers, media producers, and most importantly communicators. This part of the post may not be related to AI but I have been on this spiritual journey of finding the right way to perceive reality and design internal and external harmony and I believe AI embodies an essential ingredient which is remaining equanimous and always trying to respond in the right manner. This might sound laughable but to me the result becomes more apparent when you experience an AI’s response changing dramatically when we use language to convey our intention earnestly.
This is a positive outlook on AI, it will likely be one of the effects in my opinion. The negative aspects will likely stem from social problems rather than problems created by the AI itself. Societies like India (where I’m from) will need to take the role of integrating people and finding ways to make people be more useful and really thinking about the kind of work that is important for us all now that we have enhanced production power. I think the more likely and doomsday-like scenario would be to think that we need to become full time consumers and start living on UBI or its equivalent is rather grim. I find myself being able to do more, be more relaxed about things that would have cost more mental energy, and think about questions that I didn’t have time for earlier or I just didn’t consider earlier. I guess the impact this can have on organizations by savvy individuals, how they work and the type of work they can do will be powerful. I mean all these companies that are currently serving a large portion of market share in a certain industry and enjoying extremely high valuations while still not following the right values and cutting corners in various ways on many levels can and should be challenged by private individuals who are more savvy with the use of AI and can compete with the incumbents with less resources. This should hopefully lead to us being able to solve newer problems previously considered practically unsolvable.
I’d genuinely like to know what your experience with using AI regularly for over a year now has been like. Has it made you better at your work too? Any interesting observations? Please share it with me at raunaq at unwrangle dot com, it would be really interesting to get more perspectives on this.