How I stopped worrying and learned to love AI.

This is an image I generated for a conference talk. I ended up not using it, because it felt a bit over the top at the time and it didn’t fit the positive and creative message I wanted to communicate. However, the image stayed with me.

I really like how it captures, in a dramatically fun way, the ambivalence I have about using AI. On the one hand I often feel excited and almost intoxicated by the limitless possibilities AI seems to offer to create any software I can think of. It’s something that I can’t seem to stop talking about. And if I look around me, a lot of my friends and colleagues share this excitement.

But in talking about and further enhancing this story of endless new possibilities, I sometimes feel like the mad Dr. Strangelove or the enthusiastic military advisor Buck Turgidson from the Stanley Kubrick film that inspired this image. Sometimes, when all my agents are working and I have some time to reflect, there is this creeping feeling that I'm mindlessly walking into some kind of trap or abyss.

And this is not just about the mental strain working with AI is putting on all of us. Or the fact that maybe we’re working towards making ourselves redundant. It’s the fact that with our seemingly thinking machines doing more work for us, our software and communication start to feel more mindless. Software is becoming abundant, but also more buggy and vulnerable. Emails become walls of text that nobody wants to read anymore. Presenters are talking about slides they don't fully understand. It feels like we’re so enamored by our new smart devices that we’ve given up on thinking things through.

Even so, I’m still excited about AI and this is not an either-or situation. I guess that for the time being, I'm going to have to accept that I can be euphoric, worried and a little crazy at the same time. To me that's what makes this such an interesting time to be in.