Something Big Is Happening And We Don’t Fully Understand It

The last AI related article I wrote was in June 2023. And in the light speed development of AI, that time already feels like ‘ancient history’. Read that again, slowly, to understand the gravity of situation.

This isn’t some dramatic thought from my imagination, these are the words of Matt Shumer. In his blog, “Something Big Is Happening,” he talks in detail about the pace at which AI is evolving, a pace which most of us barely understand. And honestly, it is terrifying, to say the least.

We are already in a hyper-growth phase where AI models are building their own successors. In a few years, these systems may be capable of working for days and weeks at a stretch, developing things far beyond combined human capabilities. Amodei once presented a thought experiment that still feels unreal. Imagine a country with 100 million citizens, each smarter than any Nobel Prize winner, working 24/7. Imagine the kind of power they would command and/or the kind of threat they could pose.

Unimaginable, right? Yet, that is where we seem to be heading. Unfathomable, uncharted territory no one truly knows about.

(I suggest you go through the article to read about it and much more. Quite an eye-opening read.)

I recently became a mother. And one question has been constantly on my mind is what skills should we teach our children today so that they live a meaningful and fulfilling life in such an uncertain future? The answers are scattered and none of them are convincing enough.

Maybe resilience, because their biggest competition might be Artificial General Intelligence or even Artificial Super Intelligence and they will need to learn how to stand up every time life, or rather machines, knocks them down. Maybe adaptability to survive in a rapidly changing world. Maybe curiosity or communication or emotional intelligence. I don’t know.

But after reading this article, something shifted in me. I realised that I am really thinking about something which is far along the timeline. Firstly, these questions should be directed to ourselves. What should we do to survive this ‘disorientation phase’ that we will encounter in the next few years itself. How do we keep our curiosity, resilience and finances intact in a way that we sail through these turbulent times.

All is not that grim as well. The article also highlights the positive possibilities of hyper-rapid AI growth. One of the biggest is healthcare. There is genuine hope that diseases like cancer, Alzheimer’s and many others, which once seemed impossible to cure, might become treatable within decades. If that happens, we may witness some of humanity’s biggest medical breakthroughs in our own lifetime.

Among all the positives mentioned, one idea stood out to me the most: build the habit of adapting. I deeply believe that intelligence is adaptability. And this, in many ways, is my attempt to adapt to new realities. I am trying to share my learnings, experiences and my approach to navigate the changing landscape, while being equally clueless about what will and will not work in the future.