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6 hours ago
3
Your friend says AI will steal their job, diminish art and lead to a world drowning in broken systems and slop. Another friend says it's the greatest opportunity of our lifetime, will lead to a creative and technological renaissance that accelerates the progress of our civilisation.
They're both standing in the same room, looking at the same technology, seeing completely different futures.
Who's right?
Maybe that's the wrong question.
I used to dismiss the whole thing. I’d treat ChatGPT like a search engine and get back wrong answers and broken code. The hype felt hollow, and "prompt engineering" sounded like a joke someone made up to feel important. Honestly, I was insulted.
Then I watched the technology help me think through a problem I'd been stuck on for weeks. Created a working “prototype” from scratch based off of a drawing (the vibes were strong). Used it to learn topics I had thought would be locked away from me by a barrier of jargon and a learning curve that appeared impossible to climb. Talk about a gradient descent.
The magic wasn't in getting the right answer. It was in having something to think with. Something to reason with. Something to ask me questions, expand my mind and capabilities.
Here's what I find strange: the people most afraid of AI often haven't spent time with it, or spent time to really learn about it. They approach this new type of probabilistic system and expect it to behave like a deterministic system. And then point out that it doesn’t work deterministically and so must have no value.
Deterministic systems have their limits too.
And the people most excited about it sometimes haven't stopped to consider what we might lose, and why people are afraid and sceptical of it. They overhype AI, inflating expectations, stoking fears, and in doing so increase the scepticism of and the resistance to it.
Both groups are making the same mistake. They're letting their emotions choose their reality.
Your craftsperson instincts tell you this threatens everything you've built. Your opportunist instincts tell you this changes everything you could build. Your practical instincts tell you it's probably somewhere in between, messy and complicated and worth figuring out.
Which voice are you listening to?
The technology isn't going away because you ignore it or don’t like it. It's not going to save everything because you embrace it. It’s not going to be perfect any time soon. It's going to become part of how things work, the way spreadsheets and search engines and smartphones became part of how things work. None of those things are perfect either.
Some jobs will disappear. New ones will emerge. Some skills will become less valuable. Others will become essential. The people who figure out how to work with the change instead of against it will have different options than those who don't. This has happened before. It's happening now. It will happen again.
The real question isn't whether AI is good or bad. It's whether you're going to let fear or hype make your decisions for you. Or if you're going to do the harder thing: learn enough to see clearly, experiment enough to know what's possible, and think enough to understand what matters to you.
The magic isn't in the technology. It's in what you choose to do with it.
What are you choosing?
