Dear PiePie,
As I reflect on the year past, thinking about what to write, the question that came up was: in about 15 years, what will 2023 be known for?
I believe, when we look back then, this will be seen as the year that AI first seeped into mass consciousness. Work on AI has been ongoing for a while, but it seems ChatGPT, launched late 2022, really came up with what will likely be viewed as the first ‘killer’ application of AI technology. Surprisingly, or perhaps not, the first widely adopted form of AI is that of a conversational chatbot. I suppose language is indeed a mirror of thinking, the conduit by which our intelligence is expressed. I sometimes wonder if artificial intelligence is good at just generating words and mimicking intelligence, or at actually thinking. I suppose it doesn’t matter if we can’t tell the difference.
But AI is such that it already has the capability to write letters like this to you, much more quickly than I can or ever will be able to, and much more fluently as well. I guess, for now at least, the ideas of what I want to say to you remains inimitable, although I expect that it will one day be able to do that, and better as well.
What remains is provenance. It will not be that we can say or write things more eloquently or profoundly than AI. We can’t. It will be that those words come from us. That we are the ones who are saying or writing, and hopefully, meaning those words.
A decade from now, as we grow comfortable navigating AI in our daily life, we may well look back and see the current pre-AI times as prehistoric. Just as we now wonder how people lived without internet connectivity and smartphones and Google and airplanes and electricity and so on.
The truth is, humans have a profound ability to get by. We are infinitely adaptable, as long as we are given enough time to make the adaptation, and as long as we have within us a teeny bit of hope, a shining bright light to keep us going.
I haven’t written much this year, but you are the shining bright light that keeps us chugging along.
Love, Dad