Why are we fascinated by AI?

I’ve been thinking of this for a while now. People are so hyped about AI, especially generative AI. It would be a lie if I said I wasn’t impressed, but behind all the excitement I also paused to analyze the whys.

To gain an answer to this, I stepped back and thought about the scenarios where we get fascinated before the AI hype was there. All I could think of was, how a beginner musician get impressed by a skilled musician, how a beginner sportsman gets impressed by a skilled sportsman etc…

In that realm of skills and talent, it’s apparent that we tend to crave the ability of an expert and would follow them. Often we even get influenced by them as well as being biased towards them. This seems to be a human tendency to have a bias towards the experts.

What an AI could potentially do is curate the best and present it to us fast. Much faster than a human can. This ability of AI could fascinate us and make us biased toward it. This is what I think is the reason behind the AI hype.

Can a computer Write a poem had became an expired question nowadays. AI has learned so much from human creativity, that it’s able to generate certain creative content up to a limit.

What are we forgetting

Everything we create is potentially here to assist us, not to direct us. Yes, the tools we use are far more accurate and fast than we are, but we are the ones who program the tools on how to work.

In the age when humans invented tools, we used tools like hammers for the use cases we had. I’m pretty sure the hammer was hype at that time. And speaking of intelligent tools, the calculator must have been hype too. It’s accurate and fast with numbers. These inventions helped us free a lot of time to focus on other things.

Just like these tools, AI is also here to help us free our time by offloading a lot of logic into a computer and letting the computer follow the rules we set and let it do a share of the work for us.

For sure, the AI will be much more accurate and faster than any human in a range of tasks. such as text generation or code generation. And by the time the AI is well integrated into our life like a calculator or a hammer, the hype will settle down and our freed-up brains would’ve found a better thing to pursue.

What about the dangers of AI

An answer can be derived from our experiences with the tools we’ve created. A lot of tools have been dangerous, both by intention and by an accident. But we’ve learned to use them safely and we’ve learned to be safe around them over time.

So, AI can also be dangerous both by intention and as an accident. But we’ll learn to use them safely and we’ll learn to be safe around them over time.