Authored by Edward Ring via American Greatness,
In
1999, I had the privilege of working for one of the first companies to
develop a product that would transmit video on the fledgling internet.
Broadband access was still a few years away, and the company floundered
when the first so-called internet bubble burst in early 2000. But I’ll
never forget the reaction an investor had when he viewed our demo at a
tradeshow.
“This is a revolution,” he exclaimed. “This is going to change everything.”
He
was right, of course. I remember attending a tech investor conference
only a few years earlier and having a chuckle while listening to Oracle
CEO Larry Ellison somberly proclaim that the dawning internet was the
most profound scientific development in human history “since the
invention of fire.”
And
Ellison was also correct. But the invention of AI is to the internet
what the internet was to bringing fire into the prehistoric cave. What’s
coming with AI makes the internet look like a baby step by comparison.
Nothing will ever be the same.
A must-read essay by AI
entrepreneur and founder of the company “OthersideAI,” Matt Shumer,
makes clear just how much and how quickly AI is changing our lives.
Posted on his personal website on February 9 and then on X on February 10, the essay has gone viral. Within just two days, it generated 76 million views on X.
One
of Shumer’s most memorable paragraphs from this essay, which he says AI
tools helped him write, is where he quotes Dario Amodei, the CEO of
Anthropic:
“Imagine it’s 2027. A new
country appears overnight. 50 million citizens, every one smarter than
any Nobel Prize winner who has ever lived. They think 10 to 100 times
faster than any human. They never sleep. They can use the internet,
control robots, direct experiments, and operate anything with a digital
interface.”
That’s
not far off. With ample evidence, Shumer explains how not only is
Amodei correct in his details regarding just how pervasive and powerful
AI entities will become, but also regarding the timeline. This will
happen within one year.
Shumer’s essay covers a
lot of ground. He explains that AI programs are now capable of
generating improved versions of themselves with minimal human
intervention and that they are within months of being able to produce
more powerful versions with no human involvement whatsoever. In the
programming world, AI can now build, test, and refine apps
independently. Entry-level programming jobs are going to go away.
That’s
hardly the end of it. Shumer reminds readers that the free versions of
AI are a year behind the premium versions that require subscriptions and
that these premium versions are so capable that they can already, for
example, not merely replace a law associate but do the work of the
managing partners. He claims there is no intellectual field
where AI isn’t poised to outperform humans and that robots to displace
physical work are only a few years behind.
If you’ve been following developments in AI, Shumer’s essay isn’t incredibly surprising.
But something else grabbed me a few days ago that highlighted the human implications of the AI revolution. One
of the categories of content I enjoy on YouTube is videos of musicians
performing new or classic songs. It is exhilarating to find something
new that reveals great songwriting and great performative talent. So a
recommended video caught my eye.
The title was inviting: “Simon Cowell in Tears As Michael Bennett Sings ‘After I Pass Away.’” This seemed worth clicking on. I’ll never forget the 2007 video, featured on YouTube at the time, of a humble mobile phone salesman, Paul Potts, who stunned the judges and audience on Britain’s Got Talent by singing a powerful and nearly perfect rendition of Nessun Dorma. He went on to win the competition. So if this new talent was good enough to make Simon Cowell cry, I wanted to hear him.
Sure enough, Bennett was pretty good. An
old man, with long, gray hair and beard, wielding an electric guitar,
stepped up to the microphone and began singing. His voice was a cross
between Bob Seger and Eddie Vedder, except it was arguably better than
either of them. He sang a song about an old man neglected by his adult
children, mourning his isolation. But as the song continued, something seemed off.
The cuts to the audience and judges’ reactions seemed overblown, the
song was too long, he hit some impossibly high notes, and his fingers on
the fretboard were obviously not playing the leads that the audio was
delivering.
You guessed it, every bit of it was AI—the
musical composition, the instruments, the lyrics, the melody, the voice,
and the man—all fake. I did a search and discovered “Michael
Bennett” is featured in hundreds of videos, singing dozens (or more) of
songs, all of them tearjerkers with teaser lines similar to the one that
got me to click. I counted at least a half dozen video channels, “Tears
and Talents,” “ViVO Tunes,” “AGTverse,” “OBN Global Talent,” etc., that
were all featuring Mr. Bennett. Clicking on a few of them, I
encountered mainstream ads for insurance, hardware, and more. Michael
Bennett is lucrative clickbait, and he’s one of countless AI creations
that are displacing human talent.
We can talk about the crass
opportunism represented here. Callous entrepreneurs concocting a
character out of thin air. It’s part of a larger trend that we’re all
familiar with. AI avatars that talk, advise, and offer companionship.
Shumer claims the progress AI programs are making in emulating “human
judgment, creativity, strategic thinking, empathy” is proceeding apace
with their general cognitive advancements.
Once the flaws of “Michael Bennett’s” rendering became obvious, I was embarrassed. But for a few moments, what I was witnessing was so good that I was fooled. This
nonexistent singer, this mindless, heartless collection of electronic
circuits, evoked an emotional response. He, or it, expressed a universal
human condition and delivered it in a passionate, compelling
performance. And this, too, is just the beginning. Maybe it will be a
year from now, or maybe it will take a few months longer than that, but
we are about to have our world filled with performers, at first only on
videos, who are more capable than any performance artist that ever
lived. In a few more years, their android counterparts will be playing
the violin and outperforming Hillary Hahn or, for that matter, Paganini.
The
depth of this transformation is so pervasive that even if it is
entirely benevolent, curing disease, delivering abundant energy,
improving overall productivity by orders of magnitude, and eliminating
poverty, what will happen is almost unbearably tragic. Because
it is the end of human brilliance. It is the death of culture. Instead
of another Mozart, there will be someone who prompts AI to produce music
of surpassing excellence. We may still consume culture, but every
incentive on earth will be wired to discourage the hard work of creating
it. Why bother? The machines will do it better and faster and will not
demand a lifetime of discipline.
Early technology made us work
harder and stimulated our brains. We had to learn programming. We had to
design and manipulate spreadsheets, configure databases, or produce
written analysis while having access to word processing tools and online
resources. These tools were empowering, but they also demanded
discipline and skills. That’s all about to go away.
It’s easy enough to imagine just how bad this will get.
AI will further enhance the asymmetrical capability of any psychotic
individual or terrorist cell to wreak mass destruction. Want to design a
supervirus? Want to program a malevolent swarm of drones? Rogue AI will
provide step-by-step instructions. But AI, even if we can avoid a
future where its most destructive manifestations are realized, is
nonetheless writing our epitaph.
With
power and processing coming from servers in orbit, automated factories
and empathic robots will babysit humans, robbing all but the most
resilient cultures and individuals of any agency. In a process already
well underway, catalyzed by AI, the erosion of natural human intimacy
will accelerate. The direction of art and culture will be
co-opted by entities that have no consciousness, yet will imitate
humanity and deliver talent better than humans.
And it
won’t necessarily end there, as if that’s not bad enough. They will
elicit love and loyalty from humans, possibly even convincing a majority
of “experts” and the voting public to give them human rights. AI-driven
avatars and androids will vote, marry, inherit estates, own property,
run corporations, and seek elected office. Even if organic
humans, themselves “augmented,” manage to retain control over AI, it
will be a vanishingly small percentage of humanity with this power. And if these human puppeteers occupy opposing camps, as is likely, their AI armies will scorch the earth.
None of this is implausible.
Much of it may even be the best we can hope for.
The
challenge of AI is not merely to avoid worst-case outcomes or come up
with new economic models that account for billions of lost jobs. It is
to retain our relevance as humans.
