It's Time for a Change of Attitude

3rd November 2024

Humans dislike uncertainty. It makes us feel stressed.

And one form of uncertainty is being stuck half-way between two states.

Now we exist at this threshold between the Industrial age and the Intelligence age, which puts us between states.

I think most people haven't seen what's coming yet. That is fine as I think people will recognise and adapt to the future in their own time. What people pay attention to is a personal choice.

However for those of us who can see what's coming early it's impossible to ignore.

It's stressful to exist half-way between:

the age of industry, capitalism, and globalism
the intelligence age which will transform the world so radically that we don't even have words for what's coming

So how can we deal with this?

I began to see what was coming in around May this year, only 6 months ago.

Once the significance of what's coming becomes apparent it inevitably becomes an obsession as the subconscious minds constantly churns it all over trying to work out what it means. Like a mind virus that wastes your brain-power trying to solve an unsolvable puzzle.

In efforts to bring the subconscious thoughts into the light of reason, I write many blog posts exploring these ideas. This allows to use the research process and the logic intrinsic to language to validate and calibrate the subconscious thoughts.

Now you might think that this process would allow to put a box around the concept (of the AI revolution) and so constrain it's impact on my mental landscape.

However in-fact really the opposite happened. The more I research AI and what smart people are saying about it, the scope of impact increases. Ray Kurtzweil thinks AI is on the scale of the opposable thumb, as it will create the first intelligent beings that can design their own offspring (a power previously wielded only by God).

Can I live cognitively in the last age?

Let's postulate that being aware of the future is too stressful so we want to somehow ignore it and continue living in the previous age.

Many have tried to do this. There are certain influencers in the software development space I have been watching who respond to AI by ruthlessly tearing it apart and making it out to be complete nonsense.

I suppose I even did that at one point, although to be fair to me AI was rather easier to ignore back in 2018 when it couldn't form a coherent sentence.

But unfortunately I am already past this point. It's honestly the 5 stages of grief.

Denial: Persuading one-self it's all fake. I was doing this prior to ChatGPT. It's why you see people so passionately criticising and down-playing it on Twitter
Anger: I think I skipped this one myself, but I witnessed a particular YouTuber go through this phase when seeing OpenAI's o1 model outperform him at a prestigious coding challenge
Bargaining: Trying to put the AI revolution in a mental box by reasoning out its limitations. I have spent the past 6 months doing this
Depression: There's lots of young people on online coding communities expressing the sentiment that there's no point in them continuing to pursue the field because AI will do it better than them in a few months anyway. But since this is probably true I think it's a mistake to characterise it as a psychopathology.
Acceptance: Self-explanatory. But not necessarily easy to reach

Barriers to acceptance

What is it we need to accept?

I think it's essentially three things:

realising the futility of denial
having clear expectations for the future
learning to be excited for the future

The first, realising the futility of denial, is harder to do than it may seem. My mind keeps trying to "wake up" from this madness and get back in touch with some sort of quantifiable reality. How can we accept that the world is about to change so dramatically that it will change everything about how we live, work and think?

The second, having clear expectations for the future, is hard to do too. The people who are best qualified to predict the future of AI are surely AI researchers and futurists. But they predict a wide range of things and several of them have said it's not possible to accurately predict.

The third is being excited about the future. However logically this is hard to support because:

there is no guarantee that the benefits of AI will be distributed to the public
the benefits are hard to foresee since we don't actually know what our lifes will be like in a post-scarcity society where human labour is no longer required

The way forward

The way forward therefore is faith.

Faith allows us to transcend these barriers to acceptance and have hope for the future.

So whatever God you believe in, you'd better believe that AI resides under his wing as does everything else in this universe.

If you see AI as an abomination and a crime against God then you will be dragged kicking and screaming into the next age by the unrelenting and merciless wheels of progress.

If you see that the birth of AI as another one of God's creations, and have faith in his plan, then you will learn to move forward with sure feet and a confident heart.

When you dream that AI might answer your prayers instead of calling forth your nightmares then you will be much more optimistic about the future.