While it gets better at coding and maths, chat itself (which most people use) doesn't feel any smarter than it did 1 year ago and it is very easy to get the answers you want from it without explicitly asking for it. It backs down less fast then it use to if I pushback but it still backs down pretty fast if you do. It is going to continue to reinforce people's beliefs back to them without understanding what it is saying.
Artificial Intimacy by Sherry Turkle is a good read on this and covers more than the ai relationship bots. She broadly discusses how machines that wield language are messing with our brains and social structures.
I'm far more concerned about this than the doomsday scenarios being proffered by Big Ai. They are (un)surprisingly silent on this front.
Thank you for sharing this. I second your opinion. I think AI is going to end humanity but not the way we think. I think something idiocracy is befitting here.
It’s startling how many close people around me are so heavily submitting, or should I say, abdicating, to AI. These systems are powerful (though jagged in their capabilities, for now at least), and there is such total surrender to them, even at this current level. I’m not even talking about software/tech people, but ‘normies’ with very different jobs and lives outside the SV cultural bubble. The future will only get weirder.
It is very startling. I was amazed, these are some of the smartest people i knew in my career.
Almost feels like the combination of competitive drives and innate talent of these top performers makes them uniquely suited to being captured/enthralled by AI in a way that those that are slightly less ... competitive, give themselves a chance to be skeptical, slow down, evaluate, etc. But when this happens at societal scales, the results can be ... interesting. Glad I'm not alone. Thanks for writing!