Tom Scott: On Trying AI

Tom Scott creates a lot of fascinating videos on YouTube. I saw this recent one of his mentioned, and it’s a very illuminating take on his encounter with Artificial Intelligence (AI).

A love that his video opens with this line:

Scott mentions Sigmoid curves, and that we appear to be tracking along this curve in terms of AI. But that he’s unclear where exactly, on this curve, that we are.

I’ve been seeing more and more about AI (and ChatGPT in particular). It’s a fascinating thing that I know of, from a distance… but know very little about, in terms of specifics.

The idea of change at this scale is really intriguing. Scott evokes the advent of Napster and MP3s, and the impact that had on the music industry. I remember my own career path, where I began as a Flash developer… but eventually those skills became obsolete, when the iPhone began to take over and browsers began dropping support for Flash.

It’s an interesting notion of change, here. Because at present, AI seems to be mostly about students cheating on essays, people making ChatGPT say outlandish/scary things, and weird-o movie scripts. But this video does make me wonder how far we are from very significant, very consequential impacts to businesses and industries.

Perhaps I can use all these prior years of blog posts as a model, and train ChatGPT to write all of my future blog posts moving forward. I guess the feeling I’m having now applies to how I feel about the future of AI: it seems kind of weird, and weirdly possible.

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