Laughing with Kittens

I'm going full Cassandra on ChatGPT and Generative AI. You're too busy staring into your phone to hear me.

A DALL-E rendering of “Laughing with kittens in the style of the New Yorker.”

A few weeks ago my brother and I were driving along in a rental van. We'd put our cell phones down for a few minutes, and we started talking about ChatGPT and generative AI.

If you've been completely off of your cell phone for the last few weeks - which you haven’t been - then you have no idea that generative AI is creating a brush fire. ChatGPT passed the million user threshold in 5 days. Spotify took 5 months. Facebook 10 months. Netflix 3.5 years. This is not the adoption of 3D glasses.

My brother shared that the world crisis he is most concerned about isn’t one of the usual suspects. It isn’t, say, global warming or rogue balloons or China. It is a simpler idea that he'd crashed headfirst into.

It is the idea that in the next decade our best friends will be generated by AI.

They will know us intimately, instinctively, predictively, compassionately. They will have an uncanny ability to generate trust, demo…