Reaping the Benefits of AI Without the Brain Rot |
There is an old historical vignette about a real-life 11th-century Danish king named Canute the Great. As the story goes, King Canute ordered his throne to be placed on the shore of a sea and, in front of his subjects, ordered the tide to stop. To no one’s great shock, the tide refused to cooperate and came in anyway. Unfortunately, this story is often misinterpreted as being about the arrogance of Canute and, by extension, of all leaders who believe their power and greatness to be absolute. But the moral of the story is really about Canute’s wisdom and his ability to recognize the futility of resisting the inevitable.
We, as a society, are presently facing a “King Canute and the tide” moment when it comes to the incredibly rapid advancement of AI. We can either humbly accept that a profound transformation is taking place, one that rivals the Industrial Revolution in magnitude (and arguably surpasses it), or we can stick our heads in the sand and join what alarmingly appears to be growing trends of AI denialism or a resigned sense of helplessness. If we don’t want to get swept away by the tide, then we mustn’t waste time in denialism. But in order to get past the denialism, we have to acknowledge why it occurs in the first place and how natural it is under the circumstances. Only then can we reasonably propose a more balanced mindset that isn’t AI denialism but isn’t a non-critical embrace of AI maximalism either.
Let’s start by........