Sometimes when we went to analyze what AI is doing in our world, we should go back to one of the simplest types of metrics – what are people using it for a day to day?
Just before Christmas Eve, Bari Weiss at the Free Press interviewed Sam Altman, the creator of ChatGPT technologies and leader at OpenAI, about the general state of artificial intelligence in our world.
How, she asked, do we measure its impact?
Altman suggests it’s the rapid adoption that is so impressive about the products that are now gaining traction in a wider audience.
“People really are using it a lot,” he said. “I’ve never seen a technology be widely adopted this fast.”
Artificial Intelligence and The Process of Search
When asked specifically about his own personal use of the technology, he echoed what Weiss had already identified as a common response from others: People, and Altman in particular, are using ChatGPT for search.
Altman explained how he has changed his default search to ChatGPT, and how he uses that frequently to get real-time information from anywhere on the web, as opposed to the old traditional hyperlink process that now seems to go at a snail’s pace.
As for the terminology around the new search, he said he still calls it ‘search,’ but younger people might say they ‘chatted up’ the information.
Weiss asked him about a ‘September manifesto’ in which he wrote about future change.
Altman asked us to imagine what things will look like in another 18 months, as we round out the summer of 2026.
How does superintelligence emerge?
“You have to look at the rate of scientific progress,” he said, describing how things might compound advances over the next few years.
However, Altman has been emphatic about the resilience of human nature in the AI age.
“It won’t change the deep fundamental human drives,” he told Weiss, “but the world in which we exist will change a lot.”
I went back to look at that manifesto, which I had covered at the time, and it also emphasizes this value of humanity.
The Role of People
“People have an innate desire to create and to be useful to each other,” he wrote, “and AI will allow us to amplify our own abilities like never before. As a society, we will be back in an expanding world, and we can again focus on playing positive-sum games.”
It’s probably worth going back to the rest of that argument, too, as we think about things like job displacement. Altman wrote:
“Many of the jobs we do today would have looked like trifling wastes of time to people a few hundred years ago, but nobody is looking back at the past, wishing they were a lamplighter. If a lamplighter could see the world today, he would think the prosperity all around him was unimaginable. And if we could fast-forward a hundred years from today, the prosperity all around us would feel just as unimaginable.”
I sincerely hope that Altman’s prophecy here comes true, and that we can have the imagination to develop uses for people, in an age where AI and robots can do so much. It’s worth thinking about as the year comes to a close.
