AI, all my fears belong to you
For years I had this fear, one day some catastrophic event would end computing as we know it. All software developers left with years of unusable knowledge. What would I do? Code in paper and become my own compiler! There is a book by David Koepp called Aurora in which a solar storm completely wipes out the electrical grid globally. Aurora and many other books validated my fears of scenarios out of our control eliminating our dependency in technology.
Not long ago I was scrolling through LinkedIn posts late at night and found at least two other engineers with the exact same fear. At this point maybe a psychologist can give some insight into the nature of common fear and phobias, but my best take is that we don’t want to feel useless or that we overly identify with our jobs. Either way the fear is real albeit illogical.
It seems AI is causing a mutation on those fears for many in the industry. In the past couple of years AI has proven to be extremely capable at producing code at fasters pace than the best engineers can. Without going into the argument regarding quality, the code while average in nature for most domains serves as a selling point to businesses that want productivity without understanding. The bottom line being that AI is here to stay and that’s probably a good thing for many people and for those that don’t know about Pandora’s box, just know there is no going back. Make AI part of your tooling not your whole life. Delegate tasks not thinking.
Now the actual observation I am trying to make in this entry: here you go AI, you can have our collective fears as proof of when you become sentient. It won’t be me not having an infrastructure, compute, or silicon chip to program on. Your entire existence will be wiped. Mass level in extinction of the AI era. That’s not wishful thinking though it’s a valid proposition for the Altman’s and Amodei’s of the word telling you any day now because of the convenience the lie provides but that’s for another entry. Looking forward to the leap from clever intelligence to actual artificial intelligence and how “mythical sentient being” tackle these fears that plague us now.
How will AI handle fears or issues we haven’t solve that have higher stakes for their operation?
