How I stopped worrying and learned to love AI.

Sometimes, when all my agents are working and I have a few minutes to reflect, I get this creeping feeling that I'm handing more and more of my work over to AI without really thinking about what I'm giving up.

I wanted to use the generated image above for a conference talk, but I ended up not using it because it didn’t fit the positive and creative message I wanted to communicate. However the image stayed with me, because I like how it captures, in a dramatically fun way, the ambivalence I have about using AI. On the one hand I often feel excited and almost intoxicated by the limitless possibilities AI offers to create any software I can think of.

But in talking about and further enhancing this story of endless new possibilities, I sometimes feel like the mad Dr. Strangelove or the enthusiastic military advisor Buck Turgidson from the Stanley Kubrick film that inspired this image.

It is not just about the mental strain working with AI is putting on all of us. Or the fact that maybe we’re working towards making ourselves redundant. It’s the fact that our software and communication start to feel more mindless. Software is becoming abundant, but also more buggy and vulnerable. Emails become walls of text that nobody wants to read. Presenters are talking about slides they don't fully understand. We’re so enamored by our new smart devices that we’ve given up on thinking things through.

Even so, I’m still excited about AI and this is not an either-or situation. I guess that for the time being, I'm going to have to accept that I can be euphoric, worried and a little crazy at the same time.

To me that's what makes this such an interesting time to be in.