The Greatest Inflexion Point
I always reread the previous week's article before writing a new one. Often, I would feel the need to fix spelling mistakes, clumsy sentences and the ubiquitous grammatical errors. I try not to tamper with them too much because I'd like to keep the blog as a raw record of my thoughts at the specific moment in time. Very often, I find myself surprised by my very own insights. How did I come up with that?
I've also realised that a blog is a good historical record of the evolution of my thinking and ideas. I'm keeping this very old blog as a raw depository of my thoughts, which I can further refine and mine for future writings if I choose to do so.
With writing easily done using AI these days, a handwritten blog perhaps has a certain unique value, like handicraft. One day we will talk of an age when all writing was generated directly by the human brain, like how we marvel at the hand-tailored clothes used by our forefathers.
We actually live in an exciting time, because we are on the cusp of having AI that is capable of taking over most of the white-collar jobs. I am generally optimistic about the future of humanity, and do not believe that artificial general intelligence (AGI) will make us slaves to our machine overlords. But I am also realistic enough to know that we are not the sole inheritors of Mother Earth.
The rise of homo sapiens as the custodian of this planet is purely accidental. We humans happen to have the best brains right now, and even with our intelligence, we are still struggling to coexist harmoniously with our environment. Hopefully, our AI compatriots will have the wisdom to learn from our mistakes.
As I see it, this year will be a pivotal year for AI, because progress is moving at an exponential pace. AI is capable of improving itself, and it is a virtuous cycle that cannot be stopped any longer. We will have to accept the fact that they will become, if not already, the better programmers and designers. We humans, tend to think too highly of ourselves. And if we continue to do so, we will be completely blindsided and taken by surprise.
To me, AI has intensified our lives because everything is moving at a faster pace now. The speed of the human brain is currently the bottleneck. We can only live life at a finite speed: how fast can you consume information? All of life's pleasures come from stimulations to our brains and nervous systems. Our neurons can only process information at 10 bits per second, according to this paper. We cannot beat the limitations of our biology, but we can certainly reduce wastage.
As humans, we tend to waste a lot of time and energy on things that do not matter. Reclaim those wasted CPU cycles to learn and experience new things; make sure you focus on things that improve you as a person. 20 years ago, I wrote this blog article: Life's Most Basic Pleasure, stating unequivocally that to live is to learn, because learning is one of the greatest pleasures of life.
Today, my best learning companion is AI. It is there to help me with any topic that I choose to explore. It explains things in a way that I could understand, with analogies and comparisons. It is the best teacher to me, and the miracle is that it is available to all of us almost for free.
I'm glad that we are living at this great, if not the greatest of humanity's inflexion points, when machines are surpassing us in intelligence. My only hope is that we could co-evolve in pursuit of greater knowledge and wisdom. And the universe will certainly be better for it.
