Maybe AI isn’t going to ruin everything — or fix everything! — after all.
People as different as the pope, Sam Altman, and Jensen Huang have given me some hope in recent days: Maybe we can find an AI middle ground where it doesn’t kill us all, or become a substitute for real life.
We keep hearing that AI is going to change everything — completely reshape all that we know about our jobs, about the economy, about life itself.
Some of this seems fantastical, like Elon Musk’s prediction that we won’t have to worry about retirement — or working, if we don’t want to — because AI will be so productive that we’ll all have a universal basic income. (That seems ambitious even for someone who is aiming for a Mars colony.)
Some of this is doomerism: people who believe that artificial general intelligence will snuff out humanity.
And there’s been a rising drumbeat of understandable AI backlash, like the college kids booing their commencement speakers when they start talking about AI and the future. (After all, if it’s going to take all their jobs …)
There must be an AI middle ground
There’s always been a reasonable middle ground here. It might take some time to find it. But I’m starting to sense a shift: More and more people with a lot of influence are talking about AI in a way that’s … reasonable.
(Of course, it’s always alluring to believe that you, yourself, are in that perfect sweet spot of middle ground that no one else has found, isn’t it? I like to think I’ve been here for a while!)
Take the pope: Pope Leo XIV just put out a lengthy statement, called an encyclical, on AI. The treatise touched on a lot of topics, like regulating the technology and the jobs that could be lost.
Its title, though, was maybe most telling: “Magnifica humanitas: on safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence.”
Making sure to consider real, live people seems pretty reasonable to me.
Nvidia’s Jensen Huang tells parents to chill about AI
Meanwhile, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang also has some not-at-all outlandish predictions about AI’s effects in the near future.
Huang said that parents shouldn’t be freaking out about their kids’ college majors. It doesn’t matter if it’s about AI, he said. Study whatever you want. Again: Reasonable!
And, in the interview with ChannelNewsAsia this week, Huang called CEOs “lazy” who are already blaming AI for layoffs. “AI has just arrived. How is it possible they’re already losing jobs?”
Basically, Huang has always seen AI as a technological tool, not something that is going to remake humanity and/or murder us all. Which is, of course, a convenient belief if you’re the guy selling the chips for the murder bots, but also, just, well, reasonable.
Sam Altman and Uber’s COO think AI isn’t totally changing jobs (yet)
And even Sam Altman, who is prone to really fantastical declarations about the future — either out of his true belief or some cunning marketing, who knows? — just said something fairly reasonable.
At an event hosted by a bank in Australia, Altman said that he had been wrong about his predictions that a white-collar job extinction event would have happened by now. “I’m delighted to be wrong about that,” he said.
Buddy, same! But also reasonable to acknowledge that his wild expectations turned out to be wrong.
Speaking of jobs, there’s a recent glimmer that the fad of reviewing tech workers’ performance based on their token consumption might not be the best metric.
Uber’s COO said in a podcast interview that it was hard to justify tokenmaxxing, and that the link between huge token use and actually shipping consumer features wasn’t there yet.
About all of this, I asked reps for Altman, Huang, and Pope Leo for comment. I haven’t heard back, but I’ll update this story if I do.
Are we all going to be reasonable about AI now?
So are we entering a new era where people are not absolute freaks about AI? Absolutely not!
There’s too much at stake on all sides and too much (human) passion.
But what I’m sniffing is that at least some people in positions of power are starting to say somewhat measured, normal things about AI. You might even call them reasonable. And frankly, that’s all I can hope for.
