I’ll be serving as The Post’s regular AI columnist for the next year, and the assignment is a relief. For me. I’ve spent months diving into the science, applications, promise and fears of artificial intelligence, and while I’m increasingly confident that species death is neither imminent nor likely, it’s much less clear what life is about to look like. I’m grateful not to have to ride the roller coaster alone.
It’s possible we’re at the dawn of an incredible era of toolmaking, with the emergence of ChatGPT marking a Kubrickian cut between our bone-throwing present and an awesome future. AI tools are already predicting the spread of infectious disease, detecting guns in schools, helping the speechless speak and slashing energy consumption. There are brilliant people who say this is kid stuff. Soon everyone will have a customized knowledge assistant. The elimination of drudgery and loneliness is coming.
The doomers and Utopians both speak a little too insistently. It might have something to do with the money at stake — as much as $4.4 trillion in estimated annual corporate benefit from generative AI alone,. This is not the Manhattan Project or the space race, when the big brains wore government badges. Many of the best AI scientists hold university chairs while also cashing checks from the world’s largest tech companies.
There is always pressure in Silicon Valley to conflate inevitable with instantaneous. People at OpenAI speak of ChatGPT as their “