What to discuss with your partner about AI
Today I organised a long discussion with my partner to discuss AI futures and how we might respond to them. Here are the notes I jotted down before our conversation.
- Define AI and discuss what its capabilities are today (generation of audiovisual content, LLMs and their scores on various benchmarks)
- Discuss where AI capabilities may go in the future. Discuss the two scaling laws (Training-time and inference-time scaling laws), Moore’s Law, paradigm shift from machine learning from data from scratch to the broad use of pre-trained models, existence of language, multimodal and movement pre-trained models, emergence of Agentic AI on the business computing horizon.
- Discuss key capabilities at which things might start to be very different (define benchmarks of specific intelligent behavious that can be objectively measured)
- Discuss how much you think its good to err on which sides
- How do you think the future will be different? Along the following: careers/work, parenting, politics in our country and its place in the world, personal finance, art, social interactions/culture/everyday life, new virtues in a post-AI world, consciousness/personal identity/freedom, new opportunities for us,
What were our approaches to previous crises (eg Covid)? Are there any lessons for AI futures? What values should we renounce and what mindsets should we unlearn? (Eg. how is the value of relative human intelligence changing?) Where should AI go? How much do we want to shape that? How do you feel about AI? What are your views on AI companions?
I think in our conversation today, the most helpful part was discussing the capability of AI today and the scaling laws. Everything else still feels covered in a fog of war, and will require more discussion. We chose to remind ourselves that a strategy is discovered through learning, iteration and adaptation. We reminded ourselves of stoicism - that we would focus on the controllables. We also reminded ourselves that the future is open and that we have radical freedom to depart from our current ways of thinking and doing.
At the end of the conversation I felt a great relief because I now also had my partner solving for both of us in this uncertain and fast changing world of AI.