WSJ: “America’s bosses are getting blunt about the reality that AI leads to job cuts. The standard warning goes something like this: If a bot doesn’t replace you, a human who makes better use of AI will. Cue the race to be seen as a power user, which signifies being one of the humans getting the most out of new technology. These are the people cranking up productivity, impressing managers and making the rest of us look like slackers. The good news is we can join them. They aren’t the Ph.D.s who build machine-learning models and command multimillion-dollar pay packages. They are regular workers who have become uncommonly savvy with existing AI tools, often through trial and error. They get more done, faster, and—this is critical—cultivate reputations for being ahead of the curve.”
NYTimes: “Recent innovations in A.I. suggest our anxiety is now pointed toward a more fundamental concern: the fear of others. The industry keeps trying to engineer replacements for such miraculous experiences as “friendship” and “relationships,” outsourcing the grit and grain of human interaction — whether via a necklace that offers deadened commentary on the video game you’re playing or via a devoted chatbot that is always free to listen to your thoughts. The “problem” some modern A.I. is trying to solve is, in effect, us. Cautionary warnings from dystopias past are being deployed, credulously and with minimal irony, as solutions. Would an app’s promise to make society obsolete even seem odd now?”
Boaz Barak: “The bottom line is that the question on whether AI can lead to unprecedented growth amounts to whether its exponential growth in capabilities will lead to the fraction of unautomated tasks itself decreasing at exponential rates.”
Sam Altman: “Email is bad. I don’t know if Slack is good. I suspect it’s not. I think email is very bad. The threshold to make something better than email is not high, and I think Slack is better than email. We have a lot of things going on at the same time, as you observed, and we have to do things extremely quickly. It’s definitely a very fast-moving organization. There are positives about Slack, but there’s also, I dread the first hour of the morning, the last hour before I go to bed, where I’m just dealing with this explosion of Slack, and I think it does create a lot of fake work. I suspect there is something new to build that is going to replace a lot of the current office, productivity suite, whatever you think of docs, slides, email, Slack, whatever, that will be the AI-driven version of all of these things, not where you tack on the horrible — you accidentally click the wrong place and it tries to write a whole document for you or summarize some thread or whatever, but the actual version of you are trusting your AI agent and my AI agent to work most stuff out and escalate to us when necessary. I think there is probably finally a good solution for someone to make within reach.”
