Tejasvi Mohan Ram

We’re leaving the Information Age and entering the Age of Intelligence. We have no clue what the implications are. Else then big. “The information highway” will look bleak in comparison to the intelligence fire hose we all will be fed. Near term everything and everyone will start using intelligence, with or without knowing it. It’s already happening. ChatGPT, Bard, Bing are here to stay, it’s what comes next that will make us all wonder in awe. We’re seeing early inklings of starting this with the release of Plugins for ChatGPT. Everything is slowly getting hooked up and connected to the intelligence. We’re breathing life into the beast. Once we get used to this new way of interacting with technology, googling will feel like communicating with smoke signals and sticks. That change has already begun. Googling something in many cases feels dumb and clunky and results have no intelligence. I’m expecting rich natural language results from google and when I don’t get it, I’ll leave and use one of the existing intelligent tools. This is just the beginning. All existing software is either completely re-thought or transformed to take full advantage of intelligence. And once the low hanging fruit is transformed. Enter the operating systems. Soon we will have intelligence embedded at systems level. Omnipresent entities that will know us better than we know ourselves. If you thought cookie tracking was a problem. Now imagine a digital entity that knows every intimate detail about you, both signal and noise. It’s hard to grasp the impact of this. I’m optimistic in nature, but this change is not akin to the iPhone, this is more like the Industrial Revolution or perhaps even the wheel. Entities that almost knows or very soul, if we chose to let it. I think we will. I think the positive outweighs the negative. I believe this will lead to us having tools to fight a lot of the struggles mankind faces today. Mental health, loneliness, connectedness, purpose to mention a few. This particular incarnation of intelligence might have a hard cap on its potential and capabilities. But we’ve opened the imagination and seen what’s possible, that means we will venture beyond this version at some point. Every single knowledge worker is poised to get augmented or enhanced by this new age of intelligence. The machines are scoring 90th percentile on bar exams. What comes next, we just don’t know. Should we be worried? yes. Should we panic? No The cost of intelligence is also on a race to the bottom. It will be cheap and abundant. It’s clear that the current version of intelligence is a true painkiller, solving real hard problems, and are reaching hundreds of millions of people in mere months. We’re living through perhaps one of mankind’s most important technological forks. What goes down here might either send us down a track of endless possibilities and prosperity for all, a bountiful world of plenty. Or the exact opposite. Regardless, the snowball has started rolling down the hill, hundreds of millions have tried drinking from the fountain of youth. We are entering the Age of Intelligence 24 Mars 2023 Linus Ekenstam