Why AI changes the world

At the dawn of aviation, I’m sure there were people who said, “This is no big deal. Things will pretty much stay the same.”

Uh-huh. Right.

Are you hearing much about the current drone revolution? It’s not doing much—just changing warfare forever. A Ukrainian drone can take out a Russian tank. One little drone. A massive fleet of drones would make all current battlefield theory and planning obsolete.

Drones, by the way, can run on AI. In part, they already do. But that lone human operator at the helm in a control room in a movie—guiding a drone to destroy a remote cottage where an arch terrorist is hiding? Forget it. AI can direct thousands of drones at once. And will.

There were two basic discoveries that launched the age of AI. One, engineers realized a collection of machines could manufacture other machines. The robot assembly line. And two, the realization that AI could access, collect, organize, store, and then use billions of and trillions of pieces of data in unlimited numbers of ways. At very high speed.

Now, we are faced with this: The limit on AI throwing billions of people out of work depends on: governments outlawing certain uses of AI; and the ability to produce enough electricity to power AI. That’s it. That’s all that’s holding back AI.

So yes. We’re smack in the middle of an AI revolution. A titanic one.

For instance, left to its own devices, AI could wipe out every human paper-pushing job on the planet. BOOM.

In my previous series of articles on ChatGPT, I demonstrated what a powerful search engine it is. And I was only tapping into a millionth of its potential. Plus, while it was talking to me, it could have been handling several million other conversations.

For this article, I cooked up a special chat with GPT.

I intentionally swerved all over the place, to show how agile and wide-ranging it is.

We went from remote islands to penguins to macaroni to fashion to word roots to Greek funeral rites to steak.

The whole exchange only lasted a few minutes. Its answers to my questions were immediate. No lag.

Also notice I could ask questions in a casual style and it had no trouble with that.

Imagine trying to poke and prod Google to get what I got from GPT. I’d be at work for a month and still wouldn’t have what I was looking for.

Inferring from GPT what AI can and will do in this world, along MANY lines, you can see we’re in for massive changes.

Here is the conversation: