Overcoming the fear of AI
Truth: AI favors the capitalist, not the worker.
This scares a lot of people. However, something I have noticed about people who are afraid of AI is that they go from being unimpressed by it to feeling threatened by it.
At no point along the improvement curve do they ever see it as a tool to help them accomplish their goals.
It is important to acknowledge that AI is just an advancement on tools like Photoshop. That means AI makes *nothing* without human input first (you). It's a reflection of your imagination.
Some people wonder if it is too late to start learning about AI, but we are still in the 1990s-era of AI development, a.k.a the first-inning. Which is why I am writing about why it is important to overcome our fear of AI, not just how to do it.
The right way to prepare for a future of AI is to mess around with the existing AI tools, just for fun. Play with them and explore how you can push them to their limits to help you accomplish your own goals or use them to build something people want. They really are quite powerful already, if you could build anything you wanted - what would you build?
The wrong answer to adapting to new technology is moralizing it. Self hatred is a kind of escapism that lets you wallow in inaction. Knowing that AI favors the capitalist is your superpower, not your kryptonite. Because unlike starting a factory in the 1800s, or even an internet company in the 1990s, becoming a capitalist with AI requires no money, no college degrees, and no partners.
All it requires is we confront our own demons who tell us that we are not good enough, and who desperately tries to convince us that if we put significant time, effort, and, yes, money, in completely immersing ourselves to make something fun or interesting, it will be no use. Nobody has ever taught us how to overcome these anxieties. Nobody ever told us about tools like The Morning Pages for overriding our mental patterns. Nobody ever showed us that we can change our relationship with stress.
But maybe you think capitalists are evil people, and making a lot of money is a sin. And people who are money-motivated are toxic. I think this is a widely adopted view today that is taught in schools and repeated on news channels.
People misunderstand the role of money. They see it as an enabler of luxurious living and buying yachts, while poor people suffer and live paycheck to paycheck. In entrepreneurship, making money is feedback that you have made something that’s solving a problem for someone else.
Internet companies, unlike traditional ones, combine the mission of a nonprofit with the business model and scale of a corporation. It seems safe to say that no nonprofit for the last 20 years was on the cutting edge of solving any significant world problem. I’m not saying they don’t have value, but if you are motivated by helping other people, there’s arguably no better vehicle than to build something that solves a problem for them, and make money so you can keep doing it without a part-time or full-time job you resent. You can call this an oversimplification of capitalism but it’s at it’s essence how it works.
There is a direct link to a country’s GDP and the quality of life for it’s entire population regardless of how that GDP is distributed, that is just a fact. This is why I believe it is a mistake to demonize people who decide to become capitalists and use AI to advance the future.
When cars were invented, car owners needed to hire drivers because it was such a specialized skill. Now you drive. Before computers, you had bookkeepers do things that Excel now does for you.
Technology has been moving us in this direction through our entire history. “The End of History” is a concept that describes a world where there are no more problems because there is no more scarcity, everyone has everything they want. If you truly believe that AI is the end of history, then that means AI will work it’s way through the economy and replace all the jobs, until the only thing left is going to Mars, which it should significantly accelerate as well. And if that actually comes to pass in this hypothetical scenario, then there’s a good chance that Sci-Fi becomes real, and this is the first generation where humans occupy Mars and become a multi-planetary species.
That is a head-spinning amount of change to happen in one lifetime, I can understand why people find it overwhelming to think about. The reason why we draw out the fears in vivid detail is to show definitively that AI, even in it’s best, is not the end of history as we fear, but the start of Chapter 2 of Humanity.
The hard part about moving forward is not going to continue to be working increasingly harder for equal or less pay each year, but managing our own psychology. (Starting today)
It’s OK to think this whole topic is wild, it’s ok to be afraid about what the future looks like. Human beings have 6 psychological needs to feel anchored in change, and the need for certainty is top of list [1]. Below are the other 5 summarized
Need for Certainty - we need to feel safe and secure about the future
Need for Uncertainty - we also seek variety and adventure. We want certainty but we don’t want to know exactly what the future has in store.
Need for Significance - we desire recognition; being heard or listened to. This is why I say it’s OK to express what you’re feeling. Suppressing these thoughts will only make them grow louder.
Need for Love & Connection
Need for Contribution
Need for Growth
You can read in the above link how to fulfill each of these needs. But the key point I want to stress is that for most of us, and soon all of us in the world, we are going to have our full hierarchy of needs satisfied.
Counterintuitively, human beings struggle with prosperity. Fighting to have our basic needs met, paying our bills, and overcoming health circumstances is historically how we have fulfilled our psychological needs. It is only in the last 100-200 years that human beings have started asking questions about their purpose in life. For most of history, the answer to our life’s purpose was to provide for the group.
But if Mars is the next frontier for human society, our inner-psychology is the next frontier for the individual. No government program, socialist or capitalist, can help an individual work through that frontier.
We all know how powerful AI is, we know now that 1 engineer with AI today is like 5-10 engineers without it. But the the devil’s bargain is that you will never see that money returned to you by negotiating for a higher salary. You will only see it by deciding to start your own side-project or company.
What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.
- Richard Bach
[1] According to Tony Robbins, a leading psychologist of our generation
[2] You can find a ton of AI apps on websites like Product Hunt or on Twitter Lists.