CLEVELAND, Ohio — Close friends know I’m new to Artificial Intelligence. Had any of ’em mentioned AI to me six or seven months ago, I’d have thought they were referring to Allen Iverson. They were not.
As generational a sports talent as Iverson was, he’s no match for what the other AI is doing elsewhere. It’s made us — and I guess I should point to me here — rethink the intellectual landscape in its entirety. The technology is taking the world places that no one could have imagined in July 1985.
In the past 40 years, the leap from supercomputing to high-powered software has not been as seismic as what AI, some might say it’s in its infancy, has done in just a handful of years. I never saw it coming. Who did?
When somebody like Bill Gates, the billionaire founder of Microsoft, acknowledges AI surprised him, I think we can grasp the reach of it. Seismic might not describe it at all. In an interview on The New Yorker 100 podcast, Gates said, “AI is the most profound technology of my lifetime. It’s just a culmination of all the things I had a chance to be involved with.”
Think about how Microsoft, one of the most valuable companies in the world, has shaped our society. It put information at our fingertips; its Microsoft Word software turned the craft of writing into a less daunting task.
Yet Word can’t keep pace with what AI can do. Nor can medicine or other hard sciences. Need quick answers to a nettlesome question, turn to AI.
I don’t know what its long-term capabilities are, but AI won’t stay stuck where it is today. It’s an evolving, learning technology, one that computes at speeds even Gates can’t comprehend.
I can’t call that a bad thing. What I can call it is a scary thing, which is what the journalist who interviewed Gates did. It’s like taking a trip to outer reaches of the planet without a map to follow. AI has stretched our learning curve, he said.
Weigh that a moment, and then ask yourself are we preparing the Alpha Generation, Generation Z or even Boomers for what AI might unwrap in terms of knowledge. Are these generations ready for it?
I mentioned this to my Gen X nephew, the father of three. None have hit their teens. I advised Amir to explore AI, have his older children explore it and share what they all learned with others.
They can ill-afford to let AI run too far ahead of them.
Of course, no parent’s children will catch AI. They can and must understand it; they can and must use it; and they can benefit from all of its promises. They need not, however, fear it.
Artificial Intelligence puts a child on the hinge point of history, because, as Gates put it, AI exceeds humankind’s capabilities in many areas. It creates fresh opportunities as it shutters old ones; it finds fresh problems that need a fix.
“My concern,” Gates told his interviewer, “is we really don’t have good answers to the problems.”
That’s what put our society in “The Twilight Zone,” moving every scrap of knowledge we think we know onto another horizon, a horizon with no rigid borders, a horizon in which technology might do all the intellectual lifting.
Justice B. Hill graduated from Glenville High School. He spent over 25 years in daily journalism as a reporter, a copy editor and a sports editor. He taught journalism at Ohio University for six years before quitting May 15, 2019, to write and globetrot. He’s doing both.
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