I’ve been edging my way into using AI. Just like everybody else. We aren’t going to have much choice–it’s what technology wants, and whatever technology wants, technology gets. Just like Lola.
Technology wants what’s best for technology. It’s not just a pile of tools. It’s a super-organism with its own biases, according to Kevin Kelly. Joseph Schumpeter named the process Creative Destruction. We’re in the middle of the biggest pulse of Creative Destruction in history.
I keep wondering what the next jolt will be. Everywhere you look in the technology engineering universe you see rapid advancements but usually on a known rising incremental curve. AI had been plodding forward on the same curve as everybody else until transformer technology sprang into view with ChatGPT in November 2022.
Not even four years later its tendrils extend into every area of American life.
I was an early adopter. In December 2022 I used ChatGPT to create my Christmas card. It was laughably bad and showed the deficiencies of AI.
Boy is AI a quick learner.
Well, no, says a debunking article: Today’s AI Cannot Make Itself Smarter. AI can’t come up with anything new because it is limited to what it already knows. And it is excruciatingly expensive to train an AI with a new set of data.
I’m wondering what will be the next item that rises out of the blur of innovation and everybody sees it, everybody grabs at it.
Some innovations are normal and expected. Everybody in the United States had cathode ray tube televisions in 2000. In 2008, Sony shut down its last CRT factory as flat panel screens dominated the market. A better product at a lower price. It didn’t change the world of television.
Others are abnormal and unexpected. The iPhone was just another cell phone with a screen, but then it turned out to be the advent of a whole new kind of social interaction. Or social disintegration, depending on your point of view.
Flat screens were just moar TV. TV itself is still the same old vast wasteland.