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Down wind of the future

The up side of AI

With all the crazy advancements in the technology in our daily lives it is easy to miss the fundamental fact that we are near the trough of the wave of crazy changes coming and not anywhere the crest.

More often than not I hear smart people saying that AI is going to come along and make humans obsolete. The problem with that fear is that it has as its premise the belief that everything, or at least most things, have already been invented. That’s been the fundamental fallacy throughout most of human history, but in this case it hides within the abstraction that AIs will invent everything for us, while robotics will manufacture everything for us.

Its true, making real AI could go seriously wrong for humanity. Thing is – as much as humans suck – we are also awesome. Case in point – this guy building a suit to let him fly.

Now look at that suit – he is using a bunch of tech preventing it from having been build-able just a few years ago. The cool part though is not what he is doing with the new tech. Once he has the suit working with him basically using his upper body to manually maneuver the jets – more sophisticated control and flight can be thrown at software and some machine learning.

So while a Skynet is something to be cautious of, humans plus AI to help them make crazy stuff has the potential to make it worth while exploring. I have a dish washer, a washing machine for my laundry, a phone, all sorts of incredibly powerful things that free up my time as a human. Because of that I live better than most kings did even 150 years ago. Rather than “take our jobs” – a human and AI collaboration has the potential to free humanity to explore a crazy and exponentially increasing number of things.

Whatever else it is, the future is going to be weird and awesome.

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