Knowledge is Now a Commodity
It's at your fingertips, you just have to use it.
“Should we be scared of AI?” This was a question asked to me yesterday. My long-winded response, in short, was “Kinda.” Let’s dive into why I’m straddling the fence and build on my previous article about a portion of the population becoming obsolete due to this technology.
I want to start by examining some truths. The first truth is that the majority of the population completely underutilize the wealth of knowledge these LLMs contain. Unlike before, when a Google search would send you down a rabbit hole full of paid ads designed to lead you to websites dependent on others to write, you now have direct information in real time. Take my friend Kirk, for example. One night, he decided to have a conversation about “The Monad,” a theory suggesting that a singular AI will convert the entire world into computronium (worth a read). At what other point in human history could someone have an engaging and educational conversation, bouncing around ideas about such an obscure concept? Yet, here we are. Literally anything you want to know, you can find out, for the price of three custom coffees a month.
The second truth is that anything done on a computer will eventually be done with AI. As context windows continue to expand, this opens the door for Post-Training, which allows LLMs to be fine-tuned to a high degree of accuracy and carry out tasks. The larger these context windows get, the more autonomous these agents can become. Right now, I believe most of it is incremental, and the impact is felt more as a custom tool to solve a singular problem rather than as a replacement for a person (with Level 1 customer service agent bots being an exception). This will continue to improve. At what point does it impact unemployment numbers? I don’t know. As the agents can become more autonomous, people harnessing their power can be more productive.
Third, I believe that there will be so much automation that there will be a reflexive impact on society, creating a craving for human interaction. Humans, by nature, are social creatures. As businesses continue to automate, I believe that people will crave human-to-human interaction. Character.AI is one of the most popular websites in the world right now, which indicates that human and AI relationships will become more of a mainstream product. However, I personally believe that being able to play off emotions, expressions, and words in real time will be very difficult to replicate, even if robots come into the picture. I’m not saying we won’t have Westworld-like robots at some point, but for the immediate future, I believe that the human ‘touch’ will be craved and will serve as a differentiator for businesses. But among the human’s that are focusing on ‘touch’, what will the difference be between them?
Finally, technology is undefeated, and eventually, innovation always wins out.
Coming back to the main topic here, never in history have people been able to access such a high level of readily available information and ask any questions about it. AI is breaking down knowledge barriers and equipping people with the power to be more productive in areas that might otherwise require extensive training. The universities use to hold all the knowledge because they had the books. Now, an app on the internet for 20 bucks has it. So, AI is absolutely here to stay. We don’t know what society will look like five years from now, let alone twenty, and AI is going to touch many business sectors. In the olympic 100m dash the difference between first place and last place was .22 seconds. If knowledge is a commodity, there will be very little that differentiates the top performers. Knowledge barriers will no longer separate people; the ability to harness it will.