It is soon going to get very weird. And we are not realizing it.
A small gang of people, probably based in Silicon Valley, will increasingly have so much concentrated wealth and influence that in comparison, today’s world may look like a socialist utopia.
To be clear, the world has never been an equal place. For a long time, the royalty and the priests ruled with an iron fist. Then came industrialists of various shades. And then came the billionaire tech bros (Zuckerberg, Bezos, Larry Page, etc.)
So in some sense, the AI disruption is nothing new. But the problem here is the non-linear pace of change.
With the advent of GPT-4, once all the world’s knowledge in books, research papers, and every possible medium is concentrated in one AI supermachine, what will it do to all of us? What happens when one supermachine ‘knows’ everything, and has nearly infinite processing power?
My friend Vinod Thomas was telling me that when he now writes code, he keeps a chatGPT screen open, instead of checking Stack Overflow.
Remember — Stack Overflow itself was a massive innovation. But if Stack Overflow and a million other innovations are subsumed by one AI supermachine, then what happens?
This AI will become the ‘one ring to rule them all.’ Like a super-massive black hole, which subsumes whole galaxies, it will replace our now familiar world with something exciting, scary, or both.
In a non-linear world, you initially don’t realize when things change. And when you do, the game is already over.
And remember — this is still the early days of AI. The game has just started.
I know I sound like an alarmist. But I suspect this time, it will be different.
The things that will come out of it — the good, the bad, and the amazing — will be beyond our imagination. And so will its side effects.
We are heading into weird times. Good luck — we will all need it.
– Rajan