We’re talking about the ice cream melting before we’ve even bought the ice cream.
That’s what I keep thinking when I hear people talking about AI.
What will it replace?
What will happen to humans?
What will we lose?
Meanwhile, I’ve spent hours trying to get AI to make something that sounds genuinely human, only for the AI itself to eventually tell me:
You need a human.
And I find that fascinating.
Because perhaps we are looking in the wrong direction.
We are so busy anticipating what AI might take from us that we aren’t paying enough attention to what using it is teaching us about ourselves.
Its limitations reveal ours too.
Not because we have the same limitations, but because our fear of what something might become can make us stop evolving in response to what it actually is.
And we do this with so many things.
We predict the ending.
We organise ourselves around the threat.
We start protecting ourselves from a future that hasn’t happened yet.
Sometimes, in doing that, we participate in creating the very conditions we were frightened of.
Maybe the question isn’t what is AI going to do to us?
Maybe it’s:
What are we going to become because AI exists?
