Don’t Lie to Yourself: AI Will Replace You, Me, and Almost the Entirety of Humanity
I’ve witnessed how doctors conceal things from a patient with cancer about their fatal disease. Their relatives, following the doctors’ advice, keep hiding the inevitable from the patient. This is considered an act of great empathy. They are concerned that the patient won’t be able to handle the bad news. So instead of telling them the truth and giving them an opportunity to spend their remaining time meaningfully, they hide information from the patient.
What is happening right now with AI and humanity reminds me of the same dynamic. AI is only a co-pilot for humans in the short term. Very soon, it will replace the majority of humans. This will happen sooner than most of us think.
This is a very dramatic shift in human society. It calls for serious reconsideration of every aspect of our existence: the economic structure of society, human-machine interaction, regulation, interpersonal relationships, and even the meaning of human existence.
It seems nobody wants to voice the problem.
When writers tell me they charge $1000 per press release (400 words for a short news announcement), I have only one question for these people: Have you heard of ChatGPT? People don’t understand what is coming.
It’s a part of human nature to deny the inevitable and then figure out what to do when it’s too late. Nobody wants to leave their comfort zone. Nobody wants to tell the truth. Most humans are becoming obsolete and the trend will only intensify.
If you want your children to find their place in this world – teach them math, teach them abstract thinking, teach them to reason – with those skills they will have an adaptive mind and they will find a way to survive, most likely working on supporting machines and collaborating with them closely on next-gen scientific and technological breakthroughs. In any other case, I just don’t see what economic value humans can bring to the table in an AI-dominated future.
We will witness a lot of human misery, governmental rigidity, refusals to accept reality, significant economic shifts, big corporate lies and layoffs, and a painful search for our place in the new world. Even more, we will witness a rethinking of the meaning of human life and its purpose on this planet.