It's been a while. I've tried to write a lot, but nothing has quite stuck. The world has accelerated a lot over the past few years, but not much has really changed; or rather, not much new has happened.
AI is much better now at what it does, of course, and the response from the general public is general anxiety. Some of it predictably neo-luddite, some of it pretty poignant. We are one step closer to a "machine god", and yet people use it to accelerate the tasks they were already performing in the first place. This is to be expected. The input is, after all, what we were doing before.
Make no mistake, using AI at work is exhilarating. The dopamine hit of the inception-to-code-to-implementation pipeline taking mere minutes, hours at most, for the cost of burning a stack of dollar bills, and then on to the next thing. The mind just goes into overdrive, and I truly feel at my most productive I've ever been. It's also "more of the same" (literally, and figuratively). When the Internet came into existence, it created all these seismic waves that reverberated throughout society, reshaping it completely. We are still going through those waves now. AI, on the other hand, feels more like an amplifier than anything else, to me.
There are two ways to be wrong here: the last glue factory in Detroit, or the average 1996 e-commerce investor. Too late and making a buck, about to get run over by the march of progress; or too early and burnt out in a few years. One has to consider the actual societal change that AI can and will create in the next few decades, by giving a natural-language door into the Internet's information, for people who never had the words to open it. To those for whom a properly structured search query seemed like a tall task, AI might be as mind-breaking as a library. An amplifier for me, but a door for many.
What, then, of the amplifier itself? What if we turn it high enough, what if it starts getting feedback and creating new, unique sounds too harsh for our senses? In the past, when we felt lonely, we sought companionship. When we felt bored at work, that was a sign for a career change. When we felt tired, it was a sign for us to sleep. What if the dopamine hits I get drown out these whimpers? In a society that runs faster and faster, there's little time to stop and write essays.