The world is not solved by AI. Just look outside your window and watch it function as it always has. What's scary, however, is the way an AI chat session is replacing our ability to think. Yet I believe this is something completely within our control.
While the big AI labs are more than happy to push the narrative that the takeover of AI is inevitable, and that they already have models so dangerous that only certain parties with clearance can use them, the people on the street say otherwise. So does the delivery man bringing you your packages.
It's tempting to give in to an extremely doom-laden or extremely positive viewpoint. Either way, we're free to wash our hands of responsibility and of the need to decide our own fate. It's a simple quirk of human nature: if we can avoid effort, we will.
There's also nothing more shameful than looking like we're putting in a lot of effort and still failing, so the outcome is often to do nothing. AI fits nicely into this because it can do all the thinking and choosing for us. If we fail to follow its instructions, we can get mad at it and go on a rant. If somebody asks us why something went wrong, we can say it wasn't our fault. A clear scapegoat.
If only AI could take over our two legs and arms as well. Wouldn't that be paradise?
The thing is, a large portion of the world's population is so busy working that they don't have time to think about any of this. Perhaps they are less ambitious, but they are also not ashamed of what the world thinks about their efforts. I'd say that's a pretty happy life.
After oscillating myself between great hope and great desperation, I think the phrase "Whether you think you're doomed or destined to win, you are right" holds up.
The truth is we don't know where the future will take us. We don't know if AI in its current form is a gimmick that may disrupt the world of software and programming but, beyond that—beyond human movement, beyond interaction—there is no such indication.
We just happen to live in an era where information is so accessible, information both fabricated and accurate at least for the time being, that we feel our grasp of what's going to happen is very strong. Like the thousands of different eras humanity has lived through, we don't know where any one path may lead. Even when the situation turns dire, such as New York City in the 60s and 70s, eventually even that chaos may lead to prosperous living.
We don't have to go far to see collective swings in ecstasy. Consider new innovations that took the world by storm, such as OpenClaw, and that have suddenly been restricted because Anthropic, which provided the brains behind the operation, restricted access to its technology for anyone running one. Each subsequent release of an AI model by one of the labs has brought a lot of ignorant hype and a lot of fake certainty.
Today's news gets buried tomorrow. We move on to the next thing, and the next. Yet we think the future is so predictable and the present so powerful that it can only lead to one place. That is both the worst and best of human traits. We are resilient, always adapting to new situations, while at the same time suffering in our imagination about what's going to happen—which for some reason usually falls on the negative side of the spectrum.
There is no solving this world, or your world at least, from an arbitrary positioning of a problem. You can only really solve your specific situation, always changing, often blindly, with what you have available today. Perhaps this means using AI tools to turbocharge your work, but it's not a requirement at all. You should also be much more aware of how varying your perceptions are, especially when a crowd piles on top of an opinion or its opposite.