Yes, AI can complete time-intensive, complex tasks at record speeds. That’s the one thing that Matt Shumer got right in his now-viral essay on AI. But the tone, substance, and other conclusions that characterize the piece are irresponsible, and unproductive.
Shumer frames AI as something that’s happening to everyone at the exclusive direction of a shadowy Silicon Valley tech bros. He laments, “The future is being shaped by a remarkably small number of people.” Yet, in the very next section, he explains that he uses AI to create entire apps based on a few sentences – directions that any person could provide.
Ironically, Shumer somehow missed the obvious conflict between those two points. Yes, a handful of labs are driving the frontier of AI development. But the resulting product empowers everyone to accomplish feats that were unimaginable just a few years ago. AI is a genius coder in the pocket of anyone with a smartphone and they, like Shumer, can now develop and use apps to solve problems, create businesses, and seek new information.
This could be the greatest democratizing event of all time.
Never has it been so easy for individuals of so many backgrounds to actively direct highly competent, sophisticated, and deeply knowledgeable tools through plain english (or most other languages). There’s no degree requirement to use AI. There’s a very low financial barrier to accessing some of the most powerful AI models. And, for now, there are few government restrictions on what questions, tasks, and goals users can assign to AI. In short, AI is the technological equivalent of a ballot to democratic governance–it’s a tool of liberty and empowerment, agency and choice, self-expression and self-direction.
