My primary thought about AI is just how impressed I am that it actually works. It's been like over a year since ChatGPT came out, and practically every time I see it answer a question I'm still amazed that it can be that smart. And of course other types of AI are pretty good too, but LLMs take the cake for me.
But that doesn't mean it's necessarily a good thing. I see it as "polluting" mediums of communication and expression meant to be between people. The thought of people using LLMs to, for example, write an article, without ever attributing it to AI, is disturbing to me. And I'm sorry, but AI "art" is not art. Art is made by conscious beings. Yes, you have to be creative enough to write a prompt, but that's no more or less of a work of art then simply publishing your prompts...which of course no one would do. And I think viewing art created by AI, or even text for that matter, is a subtle cognitohazard, not unlike making love to a sexbot would be.
And of course there's the problem of AI taking jobs...where will it end? But that aspect is rather paradoxical. Ideally, cheap labor should be good for everybody, a boon to the economy. But since the economy is set up so that you have to have a job to make money, it actually becomes a problem. But maybe when the time comes that AI replaces most people's jobs, we can restructure the distribution of wealth so that most people live for free...I'm not sure. There's the problem of lacking incentive to work. Perhaps that can be solved by distributing a premium of wealth to the few people who work to do the jobs that still need done.
I also think it's wrong to think AI will necessarily go so much further just as an extrapolation from what we have now. The only technology we have now for AGI works, from the ground up, by training on human data, so it can't possibly become any smarter than some moderate level of human intelligence.
And I think it's silly to think AI will either destroy or save the world. Whatever ideas AI has to implement world peace or whatever, it will always have to be chosen to be executed by humans, and corruption, greed and ideology will always be mediating factors. And the most fundamental problems with the world aren't technical or hard problems meant to be solved by idea-men, they're actually just that people need to be better to each other, and nobody wants to. AI can't change that.
Related essays of mine: (AI Will Neither Save Nor Destroy the World)[https://philosophy.inhahe.com/2023/05/02/ai-will-neither-save-nor-destroy-the-world/], (Why AI Won't Save the World)[https://philosophy.inhahe.com/2023/01/28/why-ai-wont-save-the-world/], *On the Possibility of Artificial General Intelligence)[https://philosophy.inhahe.com/2019/09/13/on-the-possibility-of-artificial-general-intelligence/], (Cheap Labor Vs Jobs)[https://philosophy.inhahe.com/2016/11/23/this-is-a-test/]
