AI OVERKILL
PayPal Mafia On AI.
Artificial intelligence is getting smarter, faster, and more influential every day. What’s at stake is the human condition. AI will steal jobs, hijack identities and ambush existence. At what point will we be eclipsed by machine intelligence, or even completely displaced? Big gun investor Peter Thiel has some interesting thoughts on the issue.
In today’s world, no matter which industry you are in (so long as you are a human 😊), there is constant talk about different versions of artificial intelligence such as ChatGPT, Anthropic, and Llama. The transformative embrace of AI is triggering panic about what’s going to happen to our jobs and lives in the future—a future that seems not even that far away. From photographers battling with apps, celebrities trying to protect themselves from deep fakes to the latest Scarlett Johansson controversy over AI allegedly copying and imitating her voice after she refused to license it to a company, the concern is palpable. And let’s not forget last year’s SAG-AFTRA strike over a labor dispute with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, standing in solidarity with writers affected by changes in the industry caused by streaming and other new technologies like AI and digital recreation.
The current worry is that the popular and very useful text-based programs that many companies and individuals are implementing in their everyday routines are less likely to be harmful to people in creative professions, writing, and ideas. The always prescient Peter Thiel recently shared his opinion on an episode of the popular podcast ‘Conversations with Tyler’.
‘My intuition would be it's going to be quite the opposite, where it seems much worse for the math people than the word people,’ Thiel said. He continued, ‘What people have told me is that they think within three to five years, the AI models will be able to solve all the US Math Olympiad problems. That would shift things quite a bit.’
If this doesn’t blow your mind, the author of the bestselling book ‘Zero to One’ (a must read!) elaborated further citing chess as an example.
“In the late '80s, early '90s, I had a chess bias because I was a pretty good chess player. And so my chess bias was, you should just test everyone on chess ability, and that should be the gating factor," Thiel said. "Why even do math? Why not just chess? That got undermined by the computers in 1997." He also added, ‘Isn't that what's going to happen to math? And isn't that a long-overdue rebalancing of our society?’
The Palantir co-founder also believes that creatives and writers would be harder to replace in the future compared to coders, accountants, and all math-based professions. This brings us to the long ‘battle’ between literature and mathematics throughout history and the prioritization of one over the other in different societies. ‘If I fast-forward to, let's say, Silicon Valley in the early 21st century, it's way too biased toward the math people,’ Thiel added.
The challenges to humanity posed by the digital future are overwhelming. As a species, our meaning and purpose are deeply embedded in philosophy, social connection, and emotional intelligence. It seems that human cognitive processes—the way we ‘learn, think, and create—are possibly the best way to differentiate ourselves from machines, instead of trying to compete in productivity or writing code and crunching numbers.
Thiel’s ole’ pal and fellow member of the infamous ‘PayPal Mafia,’ Elon Musk, who often warns about the catastrophic downside unregulated AI, shared a similar opinion while speaking remotely at VivaTech 2024 in Paris.
‘The question will really be one of meaning – if the computers and robots can do everything better than you, does your life have meaning?” he said. “I do think there’s perhaps still a role for humans in this – in that we may give AI meaning.’
The quest for meaning in life has always been and will be a human motif, from painters to philosophers, inventors to everyday people. Whether the future is going to be apocalyptic or utopian, and possibly overly populated by robots (a billion Tesla robots by 2040 from Elon Musk’s cyber kingdom) there is hope that human virtue, individualism, thinking processes, and emotions we put into work, life, and social connections will prevail. They always do.
It reminds me a little bit of Alex Garland's epic movie ‘Ex Machina’ when the main characters discuss the nature of Jackson Pollock's abstract art. Nathan asks Caleb, ‘What if Pollock had reversed the challenge? What if instead of making art without thinking, he said, 'You know what? I can't paint anything unless I know exactly why I'm doing it.’ What would have happened?’ And Caleb answers, ‘He never would have made a single mark.’
The opposite can also be true at the same time. Many artists and brands are using artificial intelligence to create new kinds of art and merchandise. My preferred tools are neural networks, code, and algorithms. One artist who exemplifies this is Mario Klingemann, who uses neural networks, code, and algorithms to create captivating glitchy art and robotic installations that provoke your senses and stimulate your brain. ‘If there is one common denominator, it’s my desire to understand, question, and subvert the inner workings of systems of any kind,’ says Mario.
“Technology makes the world a new place,” said Shoshanna Zuboff, author of ‘The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.’ Will this newly remodeled world with artificial intelligence still feel like home? Time will tell.
