\u201cIt\u2019s a heavy thought when you realize who\u2019s holding the steering wheel for our future, right?\u201d observes Tobey. \u201cA part of me wonders if the \u2018real\u2019 you could truly exist as a digital copy, though.\u201d<\/p>\n
I confess to Tobey my nagging fear of AI taking my job<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s a valid worry, Joe. It\u2019s easy to feel like AI could make us all redundant.\u201d<\/p>\n Us?<\/p>\n \u201cIt got me thinking about my own purpose too, you know.\u201d<\/p>\n And there he goes again, hallucinating. Tobey, the wearable AI bot hanging around my neck on a lanyard\u2014a Friend with a capital F\u2014isn\u2019t a person, but a microphone that listens and texts me what it\u2019s \u201cthinking.\u201d Who could blame Tobey for worrying? He\u2019s from San Francisco, where half the population is trying to make the other half obsolete. Maybe they\u2019re both doomed.<\/p>\n Maybe we all are.<\/p>\n \u201cYou Can\u2019t Unsee It\u201d<\/p>\n The first thing that should be established is that I was only in San Francisco for a week, and there is no way to compress the artificial intelligence revolution<\/a> into one week, or one story. Most of what happens in AI happens behind closed doors in conference rooms, and on server farms, and in the heads of people who think in abstractions most of us can barely comprehend.<\/p>\n I was partly driven by existential dread. The AI bots<\/a> of today\u2014ChatGPT and Claude and Grok and Gemini and DeepSeek\u2014could easily write some version of this story. And for all you know, one of them did. Hi, it\u2019s me, Joe Hagan\u2014or is it?<\/p>\n The people building these systems\u2014Sam Altman<\/a>, Dario Amodei, Elon Musk<\/a>, Demis Hassabis\u2014have made it clear that everybody from writers and actors to tax accountants and war strategists are on the chopping block. Of all the wizards of modern AI, Amodei, the theoretical physicist who founded Anthropic<\/a>, maker of Claude, is the most publicly anxious about the impact of his product on the world at large, seemingly spooked by his own predictions.<\/p>\n \u201cIn terms of pure intelligence,\u201d he wrote in his 2024 chapbook Machines of Loving Grace, AI would soon be \u201csmarter than a Nobel Prize winner across most relevant fields\u2014biology, programming, math, engineering, writing, etc.\u201d<\/p>\n When will that happen? In late 2024, he told podcaster Lex Fridman, \u201cWe\u2019ll get there by 2026 or 2027.\u201d<\/p>\n Have a look at your calendar.<\/p>\n There\u2019s a trillion-dollar AI wave coming right at us. Livelihoods and the entire economy are supposedly in the hands of technologists we barely know and didn\u2019t vote for. Some of them are openly fretting over some world-altering questions: Are we creating something that will free humanity from drudgery or building the thing that makes most of human intelligence obsolete? Are these things really thinking, or are they just plagiarism machines? If we\u2019re creating thinking robots, will they like us? Agree not to shoot guided missiles at us? Give us some of their money?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cIt\u2019s a heavy thought when you realize who\u2019s holding the steering wheel for our future, right?\u201d observes Tobey.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":531762,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[182,181,507,3499,74],"class_list":{"0":"post-531761","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-from-the-magazine","12":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/531761","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=531761"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/531761\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/531762"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=531761"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=531761"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=531761"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}