Haven’t blogged for ages, but thought I’d get back on the horse. Thinking a lot about AI lately, so here’s a quick thought:

Is AI is simply the next progression in computing, which everyone, everyone, knew was coming It is certainly fair to say that it is a “game changer”, a “quantum leap”, etc. sure, but is it truly a paradigm shift? Depends on what happens next.

Isn’t it essentially the same paradigm?: We can create things that can “out-think” humans, solve problems that we can’t figure out with our own brains. We could go back to the abacus for a prime example of this: The human moves the levers and the abacus provides the solution. A simple pocket calculator proves in an instant that computers can crush human cognitive powers.

So, albeit a rather large increment, the change brought by AI is incremental. Significant, but not a revolutionary change in our understanding of how things work and what is possible to accomplish through electronics, coding, and vast server farms.

And so with AI as with the internet, DNA research, and nuclear physics: the real question is not what we discover, but what we do with what we discover. Ah, there’s the rub.