Neither panic nor euphoria
Like fire, the horse, the car, plane, computer, microwave, manufacturing robot, mobile phone… new tech comes. And it always comes with fear and opportunity.
Fear always went like, “Yeh, but this one is bigger, more swallowing of humans, affecting everyone and everything…”.
This encourages a totalising reaction – all bad, all one-way – accompanied by the desire to ban and control – which has both moral and practical downsides.
But these changes all also come with huge opportunity – if we keep reason and freedom, with sensible governance, and engage positively.
Because human culture on the ground goes at the speed of people (and their inertia – their ability to digest change and resist what they feel is bad change) as well as at the speed of new info, new tech takes years to go from emergent to ubiquity.
What we currently know as AI will do the same – and it will also grow generatively and lead to further new, unimagined, amazing opportunity and fears in a further wave.
But people on average are inherently social – people buy people – and new service industries will grow as some job tasks are done by AI.
Did fire end up killing the economy or growing it? The horse? The car? Etc. We are not finished with each other, and the economy will grow, not shrink.
As ever, we just need to look and think, to offer and provide value to others. Using AI or not.
Life is an adventure. There is no real alternative to that.