Brooks: Many People Fear A.I. They Shouldn’t

Perhaps overly optimistic view but useful counterpart to some of the doom predictions:

…Like everybody else, I don’t know where this is heading. When air-conditioning was invented, I would not have predicted: “Oh wow. This is going to create modern Phoenix.” But I do believe lots of people are getting overly sloppy in attributing all sorts of human characteristics to the bots. And I do agree with the view that A.I. is an ally and not a rival — a different kind of intelligence, more powerful than us in some ways, but narrower.

It’s already helping people handle odious tasks, like writing bureaucratic fund-raising requests and marketing pamphlets or utilitarian emails to people they don’t really care about. It’s probably going to be a fantastic tutor, that will transform education and help humans all around the world learn more. It might make expertise nearly free, so people in underserved communities will have access to medical, legal and other sorts of advice. It will help us all make more informed decisions.

It may be good for us liberal arts grads. Peter Thiel recently told the podcast host Tyler Cowen that he believed A.I. would be worse for math people than it would be for word people, because the technology was getting a lot better at solving math problems than verbal exercises.

It may also make the world more equal. In coding and other realms, studies so far show that A.I. improves the performance of less accomplished people more than it does the more accomplished people. If you are an immigrant trying to write in a new language, A.I. takes your abilities up to average. It will probably make us vastly more productive and wealthier. A 2023 study led by Harvard Business School professors, in coordination with the Boston Consulting Group, found that consultants who worked with A.I. produced 40 percent higher quality results on 18 different work tasks.

Of course, bad people will use A.I. to do harm, but most people are pretty decent and will use A.I. to learn more, innovate faster and produce advances like medical breakthroughs. But A.I.’s ultimate accomplishment will be to remind us who we are by revealing what it can’t do. It will compel us to double down on all the activities that make us distinctly human: taking care of each other, being a good teammate, reading deeply, exploring daringly, growing spiritually, finding kindred spirits and having a good time.

“I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination,” Keats observed. Amid the flux of A.I., we can still be certain of that.

Source: Brooks: Many People Fear A.I. They Shouldn’t