This is why AI will be a great thing for interesting people with lively minds.
The diagram below has been used a lot to explain brilliantly what a PHD is. A PHD is to take the entire corpus of human knowledge and make the tiniest leap ahead. (This image comes from the brilliant Matt Might, see below for more information and a link to it)
To discover something new. To propel human civilization ahead in a small but perhaps one day remarkable way.
Our current use of AI is essentially the opposite. It's to take everything we've known before, to find whats popular, widely accepted, from the past and accessible and to "average it out".
AI is unremarkable regurgitations of the centre of human knowledge. It's very powerful and deeply useful and allows many people to leverage their minds to accomplish more.
But in current incarnations it won't propel us ahead.
To move ahead we need to keep pricking the envelope of what is known.
We need debate, we need contention, we need new ideas, we need wild thinking, we need untethered brains, we need new combinations of though, we need experiments, we need discoveries.
The short to medium term future of most AI will be to make far more content than ever before and by definition for it to be average and based on the past.
There will never be a more valuable time to offer the opposite. To offer personal views, to offer new ideas, to be contentious in well intentioned ways. To foster the energy of informed debate .
Now is the best time there has ever been to really think, to share precious ideas, to look ahead, to post new theories, to be vulnerable, to be human.
Have a go. Nobody is born a great writer or thinker any more than they are born a great Decathlete. What makes people good is simply determination and exercise, habits and learning.
