how far would you go to solve the mysteries of the universe? or to give everyone on earth abundant wealth and make financial problems a thing of the past?
what sounds like idealistic, but ultimately lofty goals are the primary motivations behind recent advancements in AI according to ‘supremacy: AI, chatGPT and the race that will change the world’ by parmy olson.
both sam altman (the proponent of abundant wealth) and demis hassabis (with his eye on lifting the universe’s secrets) believed that the answers to their respective quests lay in creating an artificial intelligence that, once developed, would provide the answers to, well… everything.
five years, an ocean apart, and eons in philosophy, these two men competed to create a supreme technology, bringing a swath of ai tools (such as chatGPT) in their wake – tools that, like the internet and social media before them, would once again change the world as we knew it.
a competition that was investigated and contextualised by olson, who offers an account of the events leading up to it, as well as its wider impact on society and maybe even the future of humankind.
an account that felt well-researched, relevant, and surprisingly breathless for a nonfiction book. as such, her writing – especially in the later chapters – mirrored the fast pace of AI development, which i guess was the point. it felt like i inhaled them.
what made them particularly interesting were the discussions around the broader implications of ai research.
reading about how big tech throws around billions to shape the world to their liking (aka their bottom line) is always fascinating, but it was refreshing to have someone as knowledgeable as olson tracing those developments back to me as a user and human being.
it’s these aspects of critical social commentary and the real-life impacts of biases reproducing discrimination and growing inequality on an even larger scale that seem to put a particular spell on me.
it feels urgent to understand the pitfalls of these technologies.
how else are we to use them? maybe not to change the world per se, but definitely in a way that sometimes feels life-changing to me.
maybe that’s the real mystery for now – not the universe, but how we choose to shape our own future with these tools.
