A long time ago, my Uncle sat me down in front of a Mac 512e and showed me the future of computing. The first thing I did was to create an invitation to my 16th birthday party using MacPaint and an ImageWriter dot-matrix printer. (Yes, I’m that old.)
A few days ago, that same Uncle sent me this link to a post/video on X asking me what I thought:
https://x.com/farzyness/status/2018366712647680443
In it, this guy is talking about how these 5 CEOs of some of the biggest tech companies are all saying the same thing about how AI is going to be taking over 50% entry-level white collar jobs, enabling dangerous activities like creating biological weapons, this is the largest national security risk ever, etc. etc. Some good stuff, some scary stuff, all accelerating now.
Without picking apart any single point presented, here was my reply:
He has reasonable analysis about the big picture and how which segments of society/workforce are going to be impacted.
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I do have problems with a big portion of his premise: “these 5 AI industry leaders are synched with their message” about such and such achievements occurring on “this” timeline.
- There is a simple truth about software engineers: (I’m sure it applies in other fields, but this is my field, so I’m speaking from experience) They are Optimists at heart. They see problems and are confident in their ability to solve them and do so correctly and efficiently the first time. It never works out that simply. A client of mine said he always took my initial estimates of how long a particular task would take and would multiply by 3. More often than not, he was right. So when these “AI CEOs” are saying something is going to happen in •this• timeline, I temper any expectations of that coming to fruition with this experience. Even with this knowledge/experience and integration into my rational brain, I still do the exact same thing when it comes to estimating.
- Moving past actually building things, there are unspeakably large numbers of friction points in our society that will slow adoption/integration of these technologies, and that is even if the population were enthusiastically embracing them. Now imagine the kind of disruption/push back for large numbers of displaced middle-class workers. Frank Herbert was a smart guy to imagine so far back in our technology curve, a Butlerian Jihad in humanity’s future.
- Time and time again in my industry, I’ve seen so many “optimists” come out with their latest “wonder-gear” software package/product/methodology. So many of them end up as a flash in the pan, lasting about 2-3 years and then the next latest hotness came out. Meanwhile, people in the real world depend on things just working, they don’t care that that “really cool software” is what’s under the hood. This cycle creates a friction that results in a huge amount of technical debt within orgs/systems. Dependability is a whole lot more valuable to me than being wowed.
Summary: I like to remind myself of the words of Sir Roger Penrose (he was the Phd adviser to Stephen Hawking):
“Consciousness is NOT a computational process”
I’ll keep placing my bet on us humans for as long I’m going to be around. After that, who knows.