
Stay ahead of the curve in the age of AI: Be more human
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Last weekend belonged to Manus, a Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) super-agent that can reportedly handle up to 50 complex tasks simultaneously. Videos of it managing transactions while deep researching another topic and autonomously launching websites, while also planning your dream vacation, took over the internet.
This would make OpenAI and other frontier AI labs fret, but more significantly, it will cause heartburn among humans as we wonder whether AI is already superior to us. Parmy Olson recently wrote about a Microsoft-CMU study of 319 knowledge workers on how they worked with AI. A startling result was that as they started trusting AI with skills such as writing, analysis and evaluation, they practised those skills less themselves: “They self-reported an atrophy of those skills." It led to their accepting whatever output GenAI gave them, with minimal or no checking.
AI awakens in us a primal fear of losing our jobs, livelihood and purpose. This is not a new feeling. Even Socrates worried that writing “will lead to the erosion of memory." Calculators were expected to destroy our arithmetic skills.
And computers, we feared, would make millions of knowledge workers obsolete. Even so, frontier AI labs are racing to achieve AGI, or artificial general intelligence, when AI will be as or more intelligent than most human beings. Futurist Ray Kurzweil predicted that this singularity would occur in 2045.
Generative AI and ChatGPT startled him and others enough to advance that date to 2026, or anytime within the next five years. My view on singularity is that we do not need to wait until 2045, or even 2026. AI has already started taking over our world, albeit in a gradual way.
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