We’re racing towards Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and most Americans barely know what that means. We see headlines and warnings, but the researchers who are building these tools, also barely understand them. They refer to them as a black box – a question goes in the box and an answer comes out. But how exactly that answer is achieved is becoming increasingly unclear. The CEO of Anthropic recently said, “we don’t know if the models are conscious.”
It’s important that we start to wrap our heads around this technology, because right now, a few small companies are dictating our future without our say in it. They weren’t democratically elected and our current government was propped up by Silicon Valley (in the last election) to reduce regulations on this technology. That uncertainty wouldn’t be as concerning if the stakes were low. But they aren’t. What gives them the right to decide our future—especially when they don’t even fully understand the systems they’re building?
Let’s get some definitions out of the way:
Large Language Model (LLM): A type of artificial intelligence (AI) that learns from large amounts of text to recognize patterns and generate human-like language.
Artificial General Intelligence (AGI): AI that can understand, learn, and perform any task a human can, including most forms of work.
The Large Language Model era began on November 30, 2022, when OpenAI launched ChatGPT as a research preview. They thought it was going to be a small niche demo for researchers and developers – it turned into one of the fastest-growing consumer products of all time with 1 million users in 5 days. Today, 28% of Americans use these tools at least once a week (Brookings). And among teenagers, that usage is even higher, with 28% using AI chatbots daily (Pew Research Center). If the technology didn’t progress any further, these tools would continue to have a profound impact on our lives and our work.
But the technology is progressing and we’re now approaching the era of AGI. Some argue we’ve already crossed the ‘event horizon’—a point of no return, like the boundary of a black hole where escape becomes impossible. But nothing is ever so clearly defined. Especially today. The truth is that we have some really powerful tools that are really good at some knowledge work. They aren’t perfect and they don’t know us nearly as well as they pretend to. But the companies selling this technology act like they are ushering in Gods of their own creation.
The problem is the same one that Dr. Frankenstein uttered in disbelief, “I never considered what would come after creation.” We’re blindly subscribing to a narrative dictated by the companies that stand to benefit the most.
We still have an opportunity to reshape this story. The future isn’t written in stone. As cliche as that may sound, it’s important that we understand that and start to take ownership of the future we want to create. That doesn’t mean that we need to discard technology or progress. AI, in its current form can be a really amazing tool, but we need to understand that it isn’t a replacement for human intelligence. Use it as a tool to augment – to expand your thinking. To test ideas, break them, and rebuild them. Then maybe there’s a chance that we can empower people to become agents of their own future, not passive participants in someone else’s.
