AI Allergy

I remember being excited about AI. I remember 20 years ago, being excited about neuroevolutionary methods for learning adaptive behaviors in video games. And I remember three years ago, mouth watering at the thought of tasty experiments in putting language models inside open-ended learning loops. Those were the days. Back when working in AI research meant working on hard technical problems, thinking about fascinating philosophical topics, and occasionally solving real problems.

These days, I still care about the technical problems. But the wider field of AI increasingly disgusts me. The discourse is suffocating. I think I've developed a serious case of AI allergy. 

Let me explain. When I go to LinkedIn, it's full of breathless AI hypesters pronouncing that the latest incremental update to some giant model "changes everything" while hawking their copycat companies and get-rich-quick schemes. Twitter is instead populated by singularity true believers, announcing that superintelligence is imminent, at which point we can live forever and never need to work again. We may not even need to think for ourselves anymore, clearly a welcome proposition for those who have decided to anticipate this development by stopping thinking already. Where can you avoid this cacophony? At Bluesky, that's where. But Bluesky is instead populated by long-suffering artists and designers complaining that AI steals their works and takes their jobs.

At least there's Facebook, where my relatives and high school friends only rarely opine about AI. Unfortunately, they sometimes do.

AI is everywhere. However much I try to escape it by pursuing my other interests, from modernist literature to dub reggae to video games, somehow someone brings up AI. Please. Make it stop.

The discussions about the current state of AI, with all opportunities and issues, are tiresome enough. But where it gets really maddening is when people start talking about when we reach AGI, or superintelligence, or the singularity or something (all these terms are about as well-defined as warp speed or pornography). The story goes that sometime soon AI will become so intelligent that it can do everything a human can do (for some value of "everything"). Then human work will become unnecessary, we will have rapid scientific advances courtesy of AI, and we will all become immortal and live in AI-generated abundance. Alternatively, we will all be killed off by the AI. 

There are various takes on this. Let's this assume the singularity believers are correct. In that case, nothing we do will soon matter. There's no point in trying to get good at anything, because some AI system can do it better.  Society as we know it, which assumes that we do things for each other, would cease to exist. That would be very depressing indeed. Nobody wants this. Least of all the kind of ambitious young people who work on AGI so they can do something important with their lives. If you actually believe in AGI, it's your moral responsibility to stop working on it.

Another take is that people say these things because that they have a religious need to believe in some grand transformation coming soon that will do away with this dreary life and bring about paradise. The Rapture, essentially. Others may preach AGI and the singularity because they have strong financial incentives to do so, with all these hundreds of billions of dollars (!) invested in AI and many thousands of people getting very rich from insane stock valuations. These reasons are not exclusive. In particular, many successful AI startup founders are successful because of the strength of their visions. In another life, they might have been firebrand preachers. 

So which take is right? I don't know. But looking at history, new technologies mostly increased our freedom of action, and made new ways of being creative possible. They had good and bad effects across many aspects of society, but society was still there. It took decades or more for these technologies to effect their changes. Think writing, gunpowder, the printing press, electricity, cars, telephones. The internet, smartphones. You may say that AI is different to all those technologies, but they are also all different from each other.

It would be a bad move to bet against all of human history, so chances are that AI will turn out to be a normal technology. At some point we will have a better understanding of what kinds of things we can make this curious type of software do and what it just inherently sucks at. Eventually, we will know better which parts of our lives and work will be transformed, and which will be only lightly touched by AI.

The absence of an imminent singularity almost certainly implies that the extreme valuations we currently see for AI companies will become undefendable. In particular, serving tokens is likely to be a low-margin business, given the intense competition between multiple models of similar capability. The bubble will pop. We will see something akin to the dot-com crash of 2000, but on an even grander scale. Good, I say. I'm dreaming of an AI winter. Just like the one I used to know.

Remember that lots of valuable innovations and investments were made during the dot-com bubble. And companies that survived the dot-com crash sometimes did very well, because they had good technology and actual business models. Just ask Google or Amazon. In the same way, after the AI crash, there will be lots of room to build AI solutions that solve real problems and give us new creative possibilities. Lots of room for starting companies that use AI but have a business model. There will also be lots of room for experimentation and research into diverse approaches to AI, after the transformer architecture has stopped sucking all of the air out of the room.

Most of all, I'm looking forward to AI not being on everyone's mind all the time. I want to be able to read the Economist or watch BBC and not hear about AI. No Superbowl ads either, please. After the crash, people's attention will move on to whatever the new new thing will be. Who knows, longevity drugs? Space travel? Flying electric cars? Whatever it will be, I hope it also sucks up all the people who only came to AI for the money.

Here's hoping that within a few years, when the frenzy is over, there will be room for those of us who really care about AI to get on with our work. Personally, I hope my AI allergy will recede. I can't wait to feel excited about AI again.