This time, it feels different

More than everything, my increasing personal reliance on these tools for legitimate problem solving convinces me that there is significant substance beneath the hype.

And that is what is worrying; the prospect of us starting to depend indiscriminately on poorly understood blackboxes, currently offered by megacorps, that actually work shockingly well.

I keep oscillating between fear and excitement around AI.

If you saw my recent post where I used ChatGPT to build a feature for my website, you’ll recall how trivial it was for me to get it built.

I think I keep falling back on this tenet: AI, like all our tech, are tools.

When we get better tools, we can solve bigger problems.

Systemic racism and prejudice, climate change, political division, health care, education, political organization… all of these broad scale issues that have plagued humanity for ages are on the table to be addressed by solutions powered by AI.

Of course there are gonna be jabronis who weaponize AI for their selfish gain. Nothing we can really do about that.

I’d rather focus on the folks who will choose to use AI for the benefit of us all.