AI is coming for our jobs. ChatGPT is going to make most industries irrelevant. We’ll soon be dating robots. Or so the current narrative seems to go.
There’s an increasing sense of pessimism in the air about artificial intelligence this year. We are being made to feel fearful of that change that’s coming. Scared for our livelihoods, scared about established hierarchies, and scared about humanity’s general use on the planet.
I, on the other hand, haven’t been more excited about new technology for almost 25 years. Not since the late 1990s when I first got online, and the family PC was installed in our living room complete with a 56kbps dial-up connection.
Let me take you back to 1999. Third Eye Blind was on the radio, Sex and the City was making waves on the screens. I was 13, and just beginning to pay attention to the world via a pop cultural lens. And then Dad announced one day we were getting a computer.
I couldn’t have been more excited. We’d had access to the internet at school, and one or two of my friends with wealthier parents already had home computers. My father deciding to invest what was probably a few thousand dollars in a piece of technology that looked like an ice cream fridge was a lifechanging moment for me.
AI is coming for our jobs. ChatGPT is going to make most industries irrelevant. We’ll soon be dating robots. Or so the current narrative seems to go, Lee Sickling writes. Photo / 123rf
I got an email address. I spent my evenings on Ask Jeeves instead of consulting physical encyclopedias. I made friends across the world on chatrooms. I could watch (very pixelated) video clips. Soon, I’d be able to use Napster to download music. Information was, quite literally and for the first time, at my fingertips.
The Millennium (remember when we called it that?) heralded even more excitement. MSN Messenger gave me the ability to talk to my school friends all evening long. Amazon.com launched and I could buy DVDs online and have them shipped to New Zealand months before my local Blockbuster had them. I could watch slideshows of latest fashion shows on style.com, and then style my own clothes per the latest trends from DSquared and Dolce & Gabbana (but on a 15-year-old’s budget).
I was, and I felt, fully connected to the world. I went from growing up in a town of 3000 people in the South Island to feeling cosmopolitan. Metro. Bigger than my surroundings suggested.
Fast forward to 2023. We’re experiencing the biggest technological evolution since the commercial age of the internet. But instead of being excited to explore its opportunities, we’re being pulled into “evil robot” conversations, those that tell us AI innovations are the antithesis of humanity.
Max Tegmark, author of Life 3.0, argues there are three types of people when it comes to AI. There’s the kind who believe AI is so far away from being meaningful in our lifetimes, so they choose to ignore it and not pay attention. At the other end, there are the fearmongers; those who believe AI will take over everything (but especially our jobs).
In the middle, there are people like me. Technology utopians. Those who hope the tech will make our lives better, easier, more efficient. We also understand AI technology needs good governance so it doesn’t get out of hand – something missing from the current conversation because politicians are often part of Tegmark’s first group of Luddites – and if we figure that out, we’ll have a lot less general anxiety about AI.
I chatted to my colleague Peter Griffin, a technology and media commentator, who shares some of my excitement.
“In the next few years, millions of people will be able to use AI chatbots to automatically generate reports and articles they used to dread writing,” he said.
“They’ll be able to cut and paste computer code from ChatGPT to create new website features in a matter of minutes. We finally may have the productive breakthroughs we’ve been promised for so long.”
Imagine if AI summarised all threads of emails so you never had to “please see below” again? Such wins in productivity sound good to me. However, there will be unintended consequences and if we’ve learned anything from the rise of social media, Griffin says.
Lee Suckling says it’s easy to be fearful of AI right now because there’s so much unknown. Photo / Supplied
“We need to be thinking now about mitigating the bad outcomes from accelerating use of AI. Facebook connected two billion people, but made us more divided, spread misinformation, and was used to try and undermine democracy.”
The priority now, he adds, is to make sure we don’t repeat previous mistakes and have conversations about what we really want AI to deliver for us.
Here’s how I see AI tangibly playing out in our real lives in the very near future. Open AI chatbots will be finetuned enough to turn them into a commercially-viable product.
Think Alexa, Siri, or Google Home on steroids: branded versions will be given (probably female) names and physical homes on our kitchen tables. They’ll do most of our life admin for us, from telling us our Covid status to creating our tax returns ready to file.
AIs will make our current search engines redundant. We’ll use them as therapists to figure out our problems and get straightforward advice on handling them. Our physical ailments will be diagnosed from home, and we’ll then have much faster medical intervention. AIs will shop for us, and the clothes will fit perfectly. They will tell our kids bespoke bedtime stories. They will plan and book the perfect holiday for us. They’ll write every email for us, so all we’ll need to do is add nuance and personality before hitting send.
I imagine something very similar to Samantha, voiced by Scarlett Johansson, in the 2013 film Her. Except I won’t be able to fall in love with my AI, because all that flirtiness will have been engineered out of its interactions with me.
I love the sound of this lifestyle. It takes out so much of the administration of daily life and will free up my time. Time to do cooler things at work, to spend with my friends, to focus on my mental and physical health without getting so bogged down with the boring baggage of life.
Yes, it’s easy to be fearful of AI right now because there’s so much unknown. But if you allow yourself to think of ways it will work with us – not just against us – the future can become something exciting rather than something to be afraid of.
