Issue 52: Future Forward and AI
Hey hey!
Welcome to the 52nd edition of Polymathic! I know, the last one was in February. No excuses, it’s just been a whirlwind few months. Hoping this month’s issue makes up for the absence :) And you know what they say about absence, the heart and fondness :)
This month’s issue is all about AI. But from a totally different perspective from everything else you’ve read.
First some awesome announcements to kick us off!
New role: I switched to working on ‘what’s next?’ toward net-zero strategy for a company at the leading edge of ‘what’s now?’ in renewable energy. If you are working on innovative solutions in the clean tech/climate space reach out, I’d love to partner with you!
App for you: After hearing from a few dozen people asking how I get the content I curate, and sharing my scripts which they promptly didn’t execute :), I created Curated Interests, your personalized news feed for the content that YOU want. Check it out. It delivers a clean email with your interests daily or weekly. Feedback is appreciated (even critical!).
Podcast: As promised from the last issue, my podcast with my dear friend (Reza) is live!! It’s called Future Forward and it’s an exploration of the future of cities. It’s a good look at how we got here + some strategic foresight on what’s next in our cities. The first episode is ‘The Future of The Office’ and you can listen on Spotify or Youtube! As my 10-year-old son says, do like and subscribe, and share with everyone you know! :)
Now, all about Artificial Intelligence. Enjoy!
The main question I’ve had about AI is whether this is all hype or real.
Is it hype that we will see machines that become smarter than we are, sentient, and will eventually take over. This evangelism or hype isn’t new. For decades preachers like Ray Kurzweil, who is as much the subject of Artificial/a graphic novel (book) by his daughter as AI, have told us we will soon see the Singularity. The new preachers or hype men of the technology are the Sam Altman’s of the world (profile) who’ve long harbored desires to take over Silicon Valley (if not the world). All toward the goal of making money for the evangelists who go about preaching the end of mankind’s position at the top of the earth’s species ladder.
Or is it real? As preached by true practitioners like the ‘Godmother of AI’ Fe Fe Li (in this solid 1hr video) or Andrew Ng (who shares about the opportunities in the space in this video). The practitioners who talk about the opportunities for increased productivity and creativity and a new class of previously unexplored talent. Evangelists who talk about the opportunity and acknowledge the bias, unfairness, and job disruption that this technology is bound to unleash. Evangelists who talk about use cases that benefit humanity as the key need and not some scary talk of dystopia unleashed by some imaginary AGI monster.
Is it, as Ted Chiang, the author of my favorite modern science fiction books including ‘Exhalation’ claims just a facsimile or blurry jpeg of the web? Will AI rob creatives, like drummers (long read), of the critical position that they hold in our culture? Or, as James Bridle suggests in ‘Ways of Being’ (book), AI is really just a way for us to start to acknowledge multiple and infinite forms of intelligence. Animals, plants, and machines alike. If nothing else, it will change how the fabric of the internet, which has operated for over 30 years, those robots.txt web crawlers (long read), runs.
Why am I focusing on the evangelists (from both sides)? Because AI is fundamentally a technology. Technology is neutral. It is our personal philosophies that we embed into the building or the application of that technology that determines whether we will look at it as ‘evil’ or ‘good’ (8711-word long read). And it is in the understanding of the philosophies of these evangelists that we will start to discern, for ourselves, what the truth is. One thing I do know is that this is just another technology. It’s a great one, no doubt. But even electricity looked like magic when it was first discovered as adventurously explored in Empires of Light’: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse and the race to Electrify The World’ (book).
Have a great summer!
Seyi