What are the strongest cases for it and against it?
- The first question that I’ve seen divide people is: Is AI useful—economically, professionally, or socially?
- The second question that I see creating fissures in the AI discourse is: Can AI think? That is, are these tools engaging in something like human thought, which combines memory, sense, prediction, and taste, or are they blunt instruments for synthesizing average work across several domains, producing average data analysis, average student essays, and average art? I want to pause here to point out something I think is important. I’ve seen many people suggest that AI can’t “think” and therefore it isn’t useful. But these are separate questions. AI can help a scientist draft a paper, or a bibliography, even if it doesn’t meet our philosophical or neurological definition of thinking. It can be useful without being technically thoughtful.
- Is AI a bubble? This is principally a question about the speed and timing of the technology’s adoption and its revenue growth. The hyperscalers and frontier labs are spending hundreds of billions of dollars training and running artificial intelligence.
- Is AI good or bad? On one end of this spectrum, you’ve got the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen proclaiming that AI “will save the world.” On the other end of this spectrum you have the rationalist writer Eliezer Yudkowsky arguing that if anybody builds superintelligent AI, quote “everyone dies.” And there is a lot of real estate between those positions.
