Hello Reader,
I'll keep things really short this week as I have quite a few things on my plate. Also, the main PSLE papers in Singapore start next week - IYKYK.
Let's talk about the impact of AI today.
Doing AI slower
If you have been reading the news, you might be forgiven for thinking it's the end, given the dire warnings by AI experts about how AI could end humanity. Why is everyone suddenly warning about AI?
I wrote about it earlier this week. In a nutshell, everyone has an agenda for saying what they are saying. There are legitimate concerns from some experts, of course, but there is a lot of nuance out there and we can't read the situation through any single frame.
Will AI leaders and governments join hands to slow things down, as Anthropic’s Dario Amodei is calling for? Unfortunately, I don't think so, because the one who slows down will fall behind. And this is a race nobody feels they can afford to lose.
As Julia Leong, a partner at PwC wrote in a comment to my post:
It often takes a crisis before warnings like these are taken seriously enough to change behaviour. Knowing the risk is one thing. Acting on it when the incentives point in the opposite direction is another.
The end of the world as we know it
If you think about it, AI has already ended the world as we know it, hasn't it? Even if AI never gets any better, its impact has already irreversibly changed almost everything we took for granted.
Writing, design, making music, a confident "answer machine", automation, the changes will continue to percolate into every industry and facet of life.
Imagine a pebble dropped into a pond. The first ripple is easy to anticipate. What's harder to follow is everything after: the waves reaching the edges, bouncing off, criss-crossing into each other on the way back. Some parts of the pond will get hit twice. Some thrice or more.
Then visualise multiple pebbles dropped rapidly, most barely months part, some mere days from each other, each impact representing a new AI model released in rapid succession.
The only question is when each of us will feel it - and the exact shape of its impact on us.
Has your world already been reshaped by AI?
PS: Are you coming to Singapore for the Data Centre World Asia later this month? Ping me if you are and would like to meet. As usual, you can hit reply to this email; you can also drop me a LinkedIn message.
Regards,
Paul Mah
