What’s interesting is how AI fails
I don’t care about the future of productivity; I want to laugh
For the past few years, we’ve heard countless voices (yours truly included) share their worries about AI, and the future it will bring about. “It will take all the jobs”. “It will surveil us”. “It will kill us”. Alarming revelations of AI’s dystopian pitfalls, from biased algorithms to search-engine misinformation to celebrity NSFW deep fakes are now as ubiquitous as Twitter guys writing awful threads about prompt engineering a drop-shipping business (or something).
These discussions are fun, but not particularly productive. Or realistic, for that matter. What is happening with AI today has happened before.
Look at Excel. The green devil that haunts my nightmares did not render accountants obsolete. It made them better; more productive. It also created a new class of capitalists dedicated to corporate optimization rather than book-keeping, ushering in a world of untold wealth (and inequality).
Midjourney and ChatGPT are fun little toys, but, just like Excel before them, their end purpose is to boost companies’ bottom lines. Write emails faster. Take meeting minutes. Make dynamic pricing recommendations. Nothing more, despite their makers’ messianic promises.
