Bike 02
AI at large
If the laptop is the bicycle of the mind, what is AI?
In 1991 the Apple founder shared his thought of the laptop becoming ‘a bicycle for the mind’, a game changing accelerator to what we as a species can do compared to the effort we proportionnaly spend. With the latest development in generative AI embedded in tools like ChatGPT, does AI fulfill that vision or hinder it?
The Promethean shame
Steve Jobs thought devices would become ‘a bicycle for the mind’—but their effect on our brains is similar to that of smoking and junk food.
Addictive devices and social media have already hindered Job's vision
A few inventions have altered our relationships with the tools we use the way the invention of computers did, even before the analog computers the Antikythera mechanism - Wikipedia served as a rudimentary yet curious computation tool. The Gutenberg revolution is itself underrated as the paper medium is often overlooked as a mean of computation, ie transformation as it moves the calculation from its surface to the active mind that is scribbling it with ravenous ink spills. The Turing machine showed what we could achieve with a computer as a mean of transcendence of the then current state of technology.
All these tools act as multipliers of the human effort to tame, understand or transform the environment. The modern computers by their sheer raw power upscaled the multiplication factor a million folds at least. Yet, when we talk about traditional computer operations -meaning pre-AI- that are mostly based on an intricate series of ifs - then - else ..., the human effort is still present and can be perceived in a linear way when we look through the peep-hole pipeline between the input (human instructions) and the desired result (the computer's output), the geography of these operations we are using at large is linear, albeit hidden in buffed up processors, it is not magic. There lies one of the prominent reasons why the analogy with the bike works: all these systems' advancements on our life feel like a direct résultante of our honest labor, as we say in France, our jus de coude. A bug is a bug, it needs to go through the proper process of detection, assessment, resolution, testing and deployment. A feature is an improvement, it has to be imagined, discovered, discussed, planned, executed, delivered and its usage assessed.
No longer a bicycle, not a spaceship yet...
AI introduces an uncanny feeling to the whole process. Its output seems ethereal, dreamy, hallucinatory even. Receiving it feels like accepting there's an agent in the process that has its own inner reasoning, even feelings that we cannot access, and for good reasons. It is claimed to be a black box of some sorts - more on this later -
