Well, it finally happened. I’ve seen the rise of a technology and been as fascinated and slightly off-put by it as my parents were when I showed them the wonders of Windows XP. The genie is out of the bag and the lawsuits will be impending, but 2022 is the year of the AI.
As with everything that blows up suddenly, there’s decades of work behind it. From the acorns of the initial speculative fiction stories about intelligent mechanical devices to Marvin Minsky’s groundbreaking work on neural networks in the 1960s, what we now know as AI has been a long time coming. One that is finally brought into reality by a decade or so of messing with big data and ever-increasing computer power. But nobody is especially bothered about that. Not when AI art went from something of a curiosity to legitimately outstanding and when github turned an IDE into the dream of many a developer: single-person pair programming.
Honestly if there’s a group I feel bad for is artists. All these time they were told that no, there was absolutely no way that a computer would be able to replace them. And here we are. AI art you’d hang at home, AI music that cannot be copyright claimed (okay, that one can still use some work). I expect the overall sentiment was like the one chess players had when Kasparov was finally bested by DeepBlue. It’s over, the computers have taken over.
And yet, people kept playing chess; and following chess; and going to chess tournaments; and going to some extremely amusing extremes to become a champion at chess. Even if nowadays even a $300 laptop with the correct software will trash you over and over. And therein, as ever, lies the truth.
Of course people will think that AI [Insert anything here] will drive them out of business. It has been as such since the word “Luddite” was invented. However, people still like human-driven creations. In the world of easy everything, things done the craftsman way command a premium. That’s not to say that people won’t be negatively affected by this. I expect some marketing departments will be very happy when they can just AI generate campaigns. And of course the larger corporations will not cease until they replace everything that costs money with a very small shell script. But overall, this will not destroy human value anymore than the computer itself did.
This is before we even get to the fascinating debate about ownership, misuse of technology, and ethical concerns about AI. All of which are interesting, fascinating, and should take a backseat to the same conversations but about social media. You know, the last genie we let out.
I’ve been fascinated with the developments in AI much in the same way my parents were with computers. Except after being fascinated by it I didn’t immediately became terrified. At most, mildly concerned.
