The Future of Life (and Learning)

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The future of life – and learning – is progressively pixelating in my mind. I’m sharing it here not only to creatively articulate it, but to contribute to the social conversation about the impending impact of AI on our lives – and how we prepare our children.

Our brain’s evolutionary impulse is to categorize everything it encounters. This tendency is the basis for memory and the related efficient navigation of our surroundings. It’s also the root of many personal misconceptions and social misunderstandings. Reality, to the extent we can agree on what that even is, tends to resist our binary categorizations: right/wrong, good/bad, us/them, etc. Most things are simply more complex or nuanced. AI is not inherently good or bad—it is rather a mirror and amplifier of human intent. How it evolves, and what it becomes, will be shaped by the values, incentives, and decisions we embed within it. We should resist the temptation to assign moral weight to the tool – and instead take responsibility for how we wield it. As human beings with evolved prefrontal cortexes – and as societies shaped by increasingly sophisticated cultural constructs – we have an obligation to transcend our primitive instinct to generalize and categorize. We’ve all heard a version of the maxim: “To whom much is given, much is expected.” And there’s no denying the intelligence fortune we’ve inherited. Our responsibility as the carriers of consciousness is both to preserve this inheritance – and to grow it.

A Nod to the G.O.A.T.

No serious discussion of AI’s impact on humanity should omit mention of Demis Hassabis, Co-founder and CEO of Google DeepMind. While ChatGPT has dominated headlines since its November 2022 debut, Hassabis and his team have quietly led the charge in applying AI to unlock some of the deepest structures of nature itself. Their breakthroughs are beginning to reshape the boundaries of human understanding – culminating so far in a 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for solving protein folding. Many believe more Nobel-worthy discoveries are imminent. Within the next decade, DeepMind and other AI researchers will radically redefine our entire framework for understanding objective reality – from the quantum field to the cosmos at large. The impact on human life may be without historical parallel.

While the printing press multiplied access to written ideas, AI multiplies access to thinking itself. It enables near-universal tutoring, translation, code generation, etc.
What the steam engine did for muscle, AI is doing for mind. It will significantly alter – and potentially entirely replace – knowledge work, and thus the structure of employment, human value creation, etc.
Like electricity – AI is a general-purpose technology. It is not a product but an enabler – integrated into every system and application, often invisibly but pervasively. It will underpin everything from our personal devices to national security.
The internet transformed communication, commerce, culture, and governance. AI builds atop the internet and automates what we do with all the data it surfaced. If the internet is the Earth’s nervous system, AI is evolving into the Earth’s brain.