I appreciate your synopsis of these authors. I'm somewhat familiar with Harari, but mainly for his work as a medievalist. (He wrote a well-regarded book on medieval special ops before he got "big" with his subsequent, more future-focused work, which I honestly haven't gotten around to.) I also appreciate your healthy skepticism of both the utopian and doomsday scenarios surrounding AI. It seems all the "experts" writing about it can't decide between "AI is wonderful and it's going to usher in a utopian society in which all of our problems will be solved" and "AI is basically Skynet and it's going to kill us all." I'm sure AI is going to be hugely important, but I find both of those scenarios profoundly unconvincing. We've already been through a couple of "revolutionary" technological transformations in my lifetime with the introduction of the internet and then social media. Neither ushered in utopia. Neither was an extinction event.
💯 with you. Sometimes I wonder if the doomsayers think catastrophizing is the only way to slow things down for better regulation. I’m all for slowing things down, but the fear meter was already fever pitch without ai. People need hope.
To be clear, what I'm actually saying is both the Doomsday AND the Utopia scenarios are probably overwrought. Between the two, I actually think the assumption that AI will usher and Utopia is somewhat more dangerous at the moment because it lulls us into a false sense of complacency or fatalism -- whatever will be will be -- whereas we actually have a lot of agency in this area at the moment.
Great analysis, but it was 1988 not ‘82. That is if you’re thinking of 88 Reasons Why the Rapture Will Be in 1988, by Edgar Whisenant.
Hahaha. I wasn’t thinking of that, but now I’m embarrassed I didn’t! In the next edition 🤓
I appreciate your synopsis of these authors. I'm somewhat familiar with Harari, but mainly for his work as a medievalist. (He wrote a well-regarded book on medieval special ops before he got "big" with his subsequent, more future-focused work, which I honestly haven't gotten around to.) I also appreciate your healthy skepticism of both the utopian and doomsday scenarios surrounding AI. It seems all the "experts" writing about it can't decide between "AI is wonderful and it's going to usher in a utopian society in which all of our problems will be solved" and "AI is basically Skynet and it's going to kill us all." I'm sure AI is going to be hugely important, but I find both of those scenarios profoundly unconvincing. We've already been through a couple of "revolutionary" technological transformations in my lifetime with the introduction of the internet and then social media. Neither ushered in utopia. Neither was an extinction event.
💯 with you. Sometimes I wonder if the doomsayers think catastrophizing is the only way to slow things down for better regulation. I’m all for slowing things down, but the fear meter was already fever pitch without ai. People need hope.
To be clear, what I'm actually saying is both the Doomsday AND the Utopia scenarios are probably overwrought. Between the two, I actually think the assumption that AI will usher and Utopia is somewhat more dangerous at the moment because it lulls us into a false sense of complacency or fatalism -- whatever will be will be -- whereas we actually have a lot of agency in this area at the moment.
yep, totally with you. The promises are astoundingly ideological. And few seem to be calling that out.