AI and Printers

It’s been the news these days, with the turmoil and takeovers that is going on in OpenAI. Most people won’t be familiar to them, but might be instead familiar with their app/product, ChatGPT. We will see in the future how the saga unfurls.

Regarding AI, people are putting a lot of hype on it. It has become like a sugar to any technology. “Our vacuum cleaner uses AI to find all the dust in your house and removes it from your sight!” a fictional advertisement would say. AI will be everywhere and anywhere. It will takeover everything, from driving your car to brushing your teeth; AI will do it all. And we will not need human anymore. Or so they say.

My wife recently went on a wide hunt looking for an A4 size notepad. She complained her current notepad is too small, and her colleagues uses bigger notepads, which seems more useful with the large margin and space. I don’t understand her struggle, because I don’t use paper. At least not that much. There are a lot of online tools to take notes, to make mind maps and to draw graphs with. You can even then print it all, and it comes out nice and clean. Sometimes the printer does throw a spanner into your work, or itself, by not able to print due to some stupid driver. Or it prints out to some weird paper size and cuts your table in half. Or maybe you had some typos and had to correct the writing itself, something the printer can never do. Yet.

Of course to avoid typos, you can even use AI to generate the content of your note. Some app like Notion, has built in AI (paid) that can expand, comment or summarize any word you just type, by pressing a single button. The AI will scours and do its thing, and produce results based on your prompt. In fact I did use it to map out the structure of a document recently. With just one prompt, it wrote a whole document about a process, and it comes out nice and clean. And of course I need to edit here and there and customize it, replacing the generic placeholders with my specifics. It also needed some editing with the format and also checking whether what the AI suggested was actually right and not total BS. It still need the human part, which is me.

So it occurred to me that AI is not really that omni-tool that can replace the humans and cause a Terminator to come from the future, but rather it is currently more like a printer. It makes things easier, faster and neater, just like a printer makes it easy to print hundreds of words and pages, but it still needs the human to feed the word into it. At least that’s my view on this. I just hope that the future AI doesn’t require you to pay in blood, the way printers ink are priced.

For a more intellectual discussion on AI and its threat, I find this video useful. Mustafa Suleyman & Yuval Noah Harari – What does the AI revolution mean for our future? – YouTube

Thank you for reading.