If you're like me, it's difficult to process the magnitude of change that artificial intelligence will have on our lives.
AI will be the most powerful set of technologies we will have ever created as human beings. They will aggressively reshape our entire world.
- How we work.
- How we learn, move, heal, create, research, communicate.
- What we trust, love and vote for.
- The scale, healing and violence we are capable of.
- Our very understanding of our value as human beings.
Think about the scale of that. How does that make you feel?
As a species, we don't cope too well with change - especially when it's exponential. Deep discomfort with change is seemingly hardwired into our DNA. It induces fear, anger and violence. Evolutionarily that makes sense. For a hunter gatherer, change in surroundings introduced the potential for hidden danger and sudden death.
Our caveman brains have historically projected this dis-ease with change onto many of our largest technological advances. The invention of the steam train was initially met with fear. A faction of us believed that the human body was not capable of traveling at such unprecedented speeds and that the pressure would cause passengers to suffocate.
Many of us predicted the printing press would lead to catastrophic misinformation and upend the order of society and state. In both instances, our worst predictions never came to be. These leaps fundamentally changed society for the better.
So, how should we react to the change that AI will bring?
We might look back at the hysterics surrounding the train and printing press and be tempted to believe therefore ‘everything will be alright in the end.’
The problem is, they are an unfair comparison.
AI isn't simply a new, manual tool. It's the advance of machines with intelligence exponentially greater than our own. As we watch this greater intelligence emerge from primordial binary soup, the change it will continue to bring will happen at a speed and scale unlike anything we've experienced before. The impact will not be localized to one industry. The automation won't affect simply one profession or group in our society. The shift won't be simply to one aspect of life.
It's going to impact almost all of us - all at once. Can we comprehend what happens next?
The AI train has left the station. Are we capable of traveling at these unprecedented speeds as human beings or will we suffocate?
Whether naively or otherwise, I choose to believe the former. That we are not only resilient enough to endure this change but that we will evolve as human beings alongside it. That this isn't the era of artificial intelligence, but advanced human intelligence.
I want to explore what I think this evolution will look like in the field we call Design. My hope being to help, not only process the scale of that change together, but to enable us to get excited for and lean into the unprecedented abilities it will give us.
