I was delivering some training for business leaders wanting to be leaders on responsible AI adoption a week or two back, and my excellent colleague began with a discussion question on AI personality types. Consider the ice well and truly broken:
The Optimist
The optimist looks to the future with AI and thinks: yeah, things will be fine. As an amplification of technology’s ability to make our world more connected and more productive, AI will tend towards the positive, and deliver a better world for us overall. Like all things, there’ll be a mixed bag… but, in general, a good thing for humanity.
The Pessimist
The pessimist looks to the future with AI and thinks: oh dear, things are really not going to be fine. In fact, they are going to be bad. AI – as an amplification of all we’ve seen with social media – will be toxic for democracy, for the social contract, and lead to conflict between people, between cultures and between countries. A powerful tool in the hands of bad actors – dictators or profit-hungry CEOs – it is going to usher in a rough time for humanity.
The Dismissive
The Dismissive looks to the future with AI and just sees… continuity. What’s the fuss about? It’s a new technology, but nothing fundamentally new or important. We’ve had Web 3.0. We’ve had the internet. We’ve had home computers, VCRs, food mixers, tractors, mechanical looms and ploughs… Don’t believe the hype. Just another thing in a long line of over-played, over-marketed things, and nothing to get anxious about or dazzled by. I mean, have you used ChatGPT? Or made an image with Stable Diffusion? Look at the fingers! Look at the sleeves!
The Utopian
The Utopian looks to the future with AI and sees… paradise. This is Musk’s vision of humanity finally relieved from our toil. AI will make the best decisions for the most number of people and it’ll be heaven. We’ll not need to work. We’ll have the climate crisis sorted. We’ll not even need money. We’ll all just be able to sit back and… flourish.
This week I’ve met everyone… except a Utopian. I had a great chat in the street with someone who’d just bought the book (thank you) but was a committed Dismissive. I’ve had discussions with Pessimists, and heard a bunch from Optimists. The Utopians are harder to catch in the wild, but they’re out there for sure (and usually invested in this most ‘God-like’ presentation of AI’s potential to save us to the tune of many millions. And are also looking for a bunker.)
But what we must realise is that the future is ours to make, if we will grasp it. We have to believe that we have agency. This is why the book ends with the following:
Perhaps [hope in the future] lies in repeating again the lines that Thomas Paine took from the French Revolution to forge a new America, the lines that Steward Brand chose to launch his revolutionary magazine of human counterculture, that Kevin Kelly repeated on the founding issue of Wired, lines of hope for a better future if we will rise from our screens and believe:
We have it in our power to begin the world over again.
We do. And we must.
Been so lovely seeing images out there of people getting stuck into the book. Would be very lovely if you’d consider leaving a review somewhere.
Thanks. Hope it’s a good week x
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