My Thoughts On AI

TLDR: We have spent thousands of years building tools to overcome the limits of our bodies, cars because we could not run fast enough, planes because we could not fly, computers because our minds could not hold or process all the information we needed them to and each tool we built was a confession of our limitations, a monument to everything we could not do on our own. Now we are building something different, not a tool that extends our arms or legs or memory, but a machine that predicts the next most likely word, the next most likely solution, the next most likely outcome, not because it understands, but because it has learned the patterns of everything we have ever done. The universe speaks in numbers, and we have finally built a machine that can compute the code to reality, a machine that can make a thousand mistakes while we sleep, compress a lifetime of learning into hours, and sell us something we have never been able to manufacture: more attempts per unit of lived time, more chances to get things right, more life squeezed out of the limited hours we have been given.

To understand the depth of what we are about to discuss, we need to go back, not just a few years back but from the very beginning. Darwinians, you guys will have to sit this one out but the same is still true for your theory as well. From the very beginning, man was placed on this earth as its caretaker, given a task, given a helper, and given a purpose, but he was never told why he kept reproducing, why he kept building, why he kept searching for something he could not find. He did everything he was asked to do, naming every living creature and tending to every corner of the garden, and only when he had proven himself capable did the creator take a rib from his side and give him a helper, not to replace him but to stand beside him, to walk with him through the vast and mysterious universe, to cure the quiet boredom that had settled into his bones, and to help him navigate the endless questions that stretched out before them both.

Yet even with a helper by his side, something stirred within him ( A name they coined as curiosity ). He had completed every task, named every creature, done everything that was asked of him, and still he carried a restless curiosity that refused to be satisfied with simply following orders. He wanted to understand why he was here. He wanted to know who the creator was, and why he had put him on this earth. And so he set out on a journey a journey that would take him to the farthest reaches of thought, that would lead him to invent stories and religions and entire systems of belief, all in the ultimate quest to find the answer to the one question that had haunted him from the very first moment he opened his eyes: “Why am I here?”

He built tools to extend his reach, cities to shelter his people, theories to explain the thunder, monuments to outlast his bones, each one a step toward something he could not yet see, a bridge across a chasm he could not yet cross, a statement carved in stone that said: we were here, we mattered, we reached for something beyond ourselves. He built because building was the only way he knew to answer the questions that haunted him, and he built because he could not bear to simply wait for the answers to come. He built theories too, stories about gods and spirits, about cycles of birth and death, about heavens and hells and each theory was a map of a territory he had never visited, a guess at the shape of the invisible, a prayer disguised as philosophy. And yet every theory, every religion, every system of belief, left something unaccounted for, some shadow that moved just beyond the reach of his understanding.

And now, after thousands of years of building, after every tool and every theory and every religion and every revolution, man is building something different, not a tool that extends his arms or legs or memory, but a machine that predicts the next most likely word, the next most likely solution, the next most likely outcome, not because it understands, but because it has learned the patterns of everything he has ever done. What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. (NIV: Ecclesiastes 1:9 ). The universe speaks in numbers, and man has finally built a machine that can compute the code to reality, a machine that can make a thousand mistakes while he sleeps and compress a lifetime of learning into hours, a machine that can sell him something he has never been able to manufacture: more attempts per unit of lived time, more chances to get things right, more life squeezed out of the limited hours he has been given.

And perhaps the greatest waste of those limited hours has been inheritance itself. Man does not only inherit the successes of the geniuses who came before him, he inherits their unfinished work, their unanswered questions, and the limits of the tools and time they had available to them. Every generation spends a significant portion of its life learning what the previous generation spent theirs discovering, climbing onto the shoulders of giants only to arrive where those giants left off, and by the time he reaches the frontier, part of his own life is already gone. We solved the problem of preserving knowledge long ago through books, schools, libraries, and eventually computers, but we never solved the problem of preserving the thing capable of continuing from that knowledge. A book can preserve what Newton discovered, but it cannot continue Newton’s work after Newton is gone. And so man has repeated this cycle for thousands of years: learn what the dead discovered, reach the edge of what they knew, push the boundary a little further, die, and leave the next generation to climb again. But what happens when the intelligence making the attempts does not have to die? What happens when it can inherit every success, every failure, every unfinished question, and continue from exactly where the last attempt ended? For the first time, man may not only have found a way to preserve what the giants knew, but a way to keep climbing after the giants are gone.

It’s not a replacement for his mind, but a multiplier. Not a tool that makes him obsolete, but a tool that makes him faster. Not a machine that thinks for him, but a machine that fails for him, learns for him, and teaches him what it has learned. It is a machine that can take a problem he has never encountered, make a thousand mistakes, find a solution, and then teach him that solution in three hours when it would have taken him two days to solve it on his own. It is the ultimate compression of time, the ultimate expansion of effort, the ultimate extension of what man can do with the hours he has been given.

This is where the naysayers and the worshipers of the grind come to attack me because this is where the panic begins, because if a machine can do in hours what man once spent years doing, then what was all that effort worth? What was the point of all that struggle, all that suffering, all that time spent learning what could have been learned faster? Man has spent centuries romanticizing the journey, celebrating the grind, worshiping the idea that the effort itself is the reward and now he is faced with the uncomfortable possibility that the journey was just a slower, more painful way to get to the destination. The effort was not noble. It was not virtuous. It was simply the best he could do with the tools he had. Now he has better tools.

The panic the naysayers face isn’t new, it is the same panic that has greeted every new technology in human history. When the printing press was invented, scribes panicked that they would lose their livelihood. When the automobile was invented, horse breeders panicked that their industry would collapse. When the internet was invented, newspapers panicked that they would become obsolete. Every new tool has been met with the same fear, the same resistance, the same desperate attempt to hold back the tide of progress. Some of the naysayers weren’t only ordinary people but people who were afraid of the unknown and the possibility of failure:

“There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.” — Ken Olsen, Founder of Digital Equipment Corporation, 1977

“No computer network will change the way government works.” — Clifford Stoll, Newsweek, 1995

And every one of these predictions was spectacularly wrong. The Luddites feared that the machines would destroy their way of life, that the human touch would be lost, that the effort that defined their existence would become meaningless. They lost. The machines won. And the world moved on. Now with AI, man is panicking again ( no surprise here ). He is panicking because he has built a tool that threatens the very thing he has used to define his worth: “his effort”. He has spent so long romanticizing the struggle, the journey, the grind, the sweat, the tears, the long hours, the endless striving that he has forgotten that the struggle is not the point. The point is the destination. The point is the solution. The point is the thing that gets built.

“The journey is the reward.” — often attributed to Confucius

He used and uses quotes like this to justify his suffering, to give meaning to his limitations, to convince himself that the difficulty itself is what matters. But if a machine can solve a problem in hours without suffering at all, then what was all that suffering for? If a machine can learn a skill in days without struggling at all, then what was all that struggle for? If a machine can build something in weeks without blowing a fuse, then what was all that effort for? Man’s history was never the preservation of limitations, but rather the systematic elimination of them.

I do believe that success requires effort, but not mine anymore and if life is a game, let the creator know that we have found the cheat codes and that we will be ending this game soon.