foo for thought

My dad asked me an interesting question the other day, “Why does it seem like the younger generation is against AI?” For me, the answer was relatively obvious – creative endeavors and liberal arts-adjacent professions have quite the sub-optimized AI suite. For starters, these aren’t really fields that can be optimized. You can’t optimally paint a picture by averaging out the best pictures like you can optimally code by averaging the best code. There’s a stark difference between optimizable fields (eg. engineering, finance, data analysis) and unoptimizable fields (eg. art, music, history, writing, opinionated anything, research papers). I’m not going to point out each and every one because this entire thing is inherently political – each of these fields realistically sits on a gradient of “optimizability”. One end is art, the other is reading a long PDF.

The other reason, which I’ll get out of the way, is the clear environmental impact that AI has. This doesn’t quite resonate with the average white-collar worker who has lived through dozens of these “new technologies”, seeing the environmental impact each and every time as a “cost” that’s necessary. I won’t be diving into this that much because it is way more political and, a consequence of the generational gap more-so than a correctness gap.

My unique take on AI is to simultaneously agree with everyone and disagree with everyone. This is not me playing the “centrist” by refusing to pick a side, it’s picking a third perspective to the situation. I do not think there is “pro-AI” and “anti-AI”, that is far too simplistic of an outlook for a concept that is much too un-evolved for us to even see. No – I believe in AI the way that I can also believe in quantum computing. It’s a conceptually powerful technology that can positively transform civilization. I think the evidence is much too damning to say that AI is “just a fad”, it is genuinely transformative in its capability to do work.

Now, at the same time, I also disagree with “pro-AI”, the idea that AI will eventually replace everything. I don’t think that’s true, I don’t think that will ever be true. The computer, while super magical to the people of the world when it was introduced, also, funny enough, doesn’t fix all of our problems for us! It just introduced software engineers, software as a profession. This is somehow “the different one” because it can talk like a person? I don’t buy it. OpenAI and Anthropic both do not make money. If this was such a crazy self-sufficient money-making machine, they would be rolling in dough, trillionaires. Everyone would be in the LLM business. But they’re not.

AI can’t do everything, not even close. If you’ve used it for more than two seconds to try to accomplish any actual, real world task you know that it’s not trivial. It’s not easy. It definitely seems like magic when AI can whip out code that would take me days, but I absolutely guarantee you that if I had a different profession, I would not be able to make websites with the same technical rigor as I do now. Not even close.

I told my friend the other day – I think this age of AI is like, if everyone looked at the first airplane ever conceived (the one the Wright bros flew or whatever) and said The future is aviation! Soon we’ll all be in the air! Which, isn’t necessarily wrong, but now imagine if every company began pushing aviation down everyone’s throats, got everyone to fly on these awful planes to commute everywhere. That’s where I think we’re close to with AI now – a technology with the potential to change a lot of what we do and might already be able to do so, but nothing earth shattering. Nothing transforming the fabric of how we live.

We’re not in the “golden ages”, not even close. It’ll take another 5-10 years at the bare minimum for society to be meaningfully impacted by AI. Economy is “growing” now but AI companies also “aren’t making any money”.

So the next time you hear “AI is the future”, take it at face value. Critically analyze every AI application that gets shoved at your face. Some might surprise you, some might be legitimately cool and allow you to do things you’ve only dreamed of. I can speak from experience when I say I can code things I genuinely never expected to be able to do because of AI. But, stay grounded. Stay aware of the things that AI can actually do, and don’t get scared because of some clickbait you see online.