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AI excels at generating opportunities but struggles with deciding what matters. New research reveals why human judgment—not technical skill—becomes the scarce premium as AI reshapes expertise and organizational decision-making.
A lecture by Joscha Bach, delivered at the Artificiality Summit 2024 in Bend, Oregon
We are dedicated to unraveling the profound impact of AI on our society, communities, workplaces, and personal lives. To truly grasp this transformation, our approach is rooted in engaging with core concepts such as critical thinking, logical analysis, and the scrutiny of underlying assumptions, principles that are essential in the realm of philosophical inquiry.
In the era of generative AI, characterized by seamless co-creation and the economics of intimacy, worries about AI encroaching on agency have more existential elements. They go to the essence of humanity, as machines now actively participate in significant aspects of original thought.
On a surface level, AI might seem like the perfect solution to the challenges of social learning. But is this really true? Is it actually what we want?
In science, traditional human search strategies are like wandering through a wilderness with limited visibility, relying on intuition and serendipity. AI, in contrast, can take in the whole landscape, quickly and effectively exploring the vast range of possible combinations.
Context is everything—whom you're with, where you're going, and why. Machines currently lack the ability to understand this context, but generative AI, especially modern large language models, hold the promise of changing this limitation.
The future of the extended mind is not a fixed destination but an ongoing journey that requires our active participation and reflection as we redefine what it means to be human in an age of artificial intelligence.
Complex change recognizes that change is non-linear, emergent, and deeply interconnected with the system in which it occurs. This is even more important as we adapt to the complexity of generative AI.
AI's potential is vast but many applications remain incremental, simply grafting AI onto outdated frameworks. This is why we embrace complexity. We think about designing incentives, understanding self-organization and distributed control, and planning for emergence and adaptation.
I agree with the government that antitrust is important. That said, I would hate to see data privacy and security diminished just as we are trying to take advantage of AI’s power to be a personalized digital partner.
ChatGPT and similar tools can significantly alter workflows by changing how we match tasks with skills. Think of a two-by-two matrix: on one axis, you have the skill needed for a task; on the other, the worker's proficiency level.
Sensemaking is going to change. AI will allow us to find story-less, a-narrative yet meaningful correlations. Our minds will have to be open to a new kind of awe: that which a machine can make sense of that we cannot.
It appears that there is one effect many researchers are finding across multiple fields: generative AI has a significant impact on lower skilled and less experienced people. However, if we automate difficult tasks we cut ourselves off from the essential components for achieving mastery like flow.
