The Future of AI Isn’t What You Think
What can science fiction and history tell us about where AI is headed?
The hype cycle around artificial intelligence — at least the large language model version of AI — has been strong and swift. There was an initial burst of optimism after the release of ChatGPT, in which people seemed to think it was amazing and would change everything forever. Now, we’ve settled into a period in which, under closer scrutiny, the tool seems to not be very good at what it purports to do.
We seem to be in kind of a weird place with AI. On the one hand, it feels like the Next Big Thing. Tons of money is pouring into AI, and everybody from Snapchat to Microsoft is scrambling to incorporate AI chatbots into their platforms. On the other hand, even carefully planned corporate demonstrations of new AI technology have revealed it to be far from perfect — both Microsoft’s and Google’s AI platforms made embarrassing factual errors in their big, flashy demos.
So where is this headed? I can see four possible futures, from apocalyptic to utopian. I’ll describe them in order, from what I think is least likely to most likely.
The Apocalypse
It’s reasonable to worry about the negative impacts of AI. It’s kind of fun to worry about it, too — some of my…
