AI Makes Me Doubt Everything

 By Tim Challies - Posted at @challies:

Most technological innovations take place slowly and then all at once. We first begin to hear about them as distant possibilities, then receive the first hints that they are drawing near, and then one day we realize they are all around us. This is exactly how it is proving with the latest and greatest technology, AI.

AI holds out many promises. In fact, it’s hard to find a field or discipline for which someone hasn’t promised that AI will disrupt or full-out transform it. From the classroom to the pulpit, from editing to engineering, from drawing to driving, someone has identified a shortcoming and promised AI as the solution.

Like most technologies that have come before it, AI is being introduced with far more thought to early adoption and gaining market share than to potential concerns or drawbacks. Everyone seems to be asking where and how quickly they can introduce it lest they lose a competitive advantage. Far fewer are taking the time to ask, “But where may it harm us? Where may it cost more than it helps and where will it give less than it takes? Where will it help and assist us and where will it infringe upon our very humanity?”

You’d think we would have learned by now. You’d think we would have learned from the rise of the Internet and with it the rise of pornography addiction among young men or the rise of Instagram and with it the terrible cost it exacted from young women. Yet so many press on, blinded by optimism and terrified of missing out.

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