The WordPress/JetPack writing prompt for today is:
What do you think is the future of AI?
Generic things. IKEA delivers generic things: There’s nothing more bookshelf than a Billy bookshelf. That’s not necessarily bad. They’re good in some way, and they can be the base for making something better. But they’re still generic, and not too sturdy, and just disposable.
That’s the future of AI as it relates to the current uses – ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, etc. They’ll make disposable goods of mediocre quality.
There are specialized types of AI, such as those used in medical and pharmaceutical research, that I do think will produce a major positive impact on our lives. But those aren’t the types of AI that you’re seeing and hearing about.
You’re being fed Copilot, Alexa, Siri, Gemini. These will probably stay with us for a while, but I feel that they’ll fall out of popularity and eventually being caught using one will be seen as being a type of bro (I want to say “a Chad”) who can’t distinguish hype from reality; The overdressed creepy guy hitting you up in the bar, but now with “AI-proven” pick up lines. He thinks he’s found the magical answer to everything, but really he’s going down a long-since discredited path, being sucked into one scam after another, convinced he’s one click away from being a millionaire.
The people who don’t use AI will slowly find each other and appreciate the bespoke nature of each other’s communication and art. “Authenticity” will become not only a buzz word but a deeply ingrained movement towards an AI-free lifestyle.
There will still be the negative impacts of AI. The hacking that we’ve seen (most recently of grocery store refrigerators in France) will continue until we harden and de-integrate technologies (There’s no reason in hell for those fridges to be online except the convenience of some supervisor who doesn’t want to make a site visit to ensure they’re working). But eventually this too will play itself out, with occasional spasms caused by neglect or carelessness.
Over a decade ago, I wrote a blog post about how AI is most often portrayed as evil in movies but as benevolent in books. You can read that here.