Hopeful thoughts.

AI can speak protein coding languages. Sample your blood and generate the protien structure that kills only your cancer. Or fixes your degenerative disease. Or improves photosynthesis to a level where we can sequester carbon out of the atmosphere, and make it into wood or hack algea to make fuel for us so that we only burn atmospheric carbon and half global warming.

When enough jobs are eliminated governments are forced to implement universal basic income to keep society stable. You will have a place to live and food to eat. AI will keep you endlessly entertained and people using AI to generate all forms of media will allow you to listen to "new" Beatles songs on demand.

Less hopeful thoughts.

AI will be used as a propaganda generator. I read the liked tweets of a Christian pastor I knew. 15 minute cities - so a city that has everything you need, within a 15 minute walk - are a government control plot.

That level of thinking won't go away, pushback on improving society for "the others" won't be accepted by everyone. Humans are going to human, the most selfish among us are going to continue to make sure they get theirs and can play their power games over others.

Either way, it's going to get weird. Today we have a shared, global media environment (for better or worse). We all watch the World Cup of soccer, we watch marvel movies. When you can generate a custom marvel movie faster than I can type all this, we'll lose those connections between you and the stranger at the grocery store.

Humanity "survived" the taming of electricity. Jobs changed, new places were created, new jobs were made, new art, new foods, new objects. I think AI is of the scale of electricity being tamed, but will happen on a month's to years timescale instead of decades it took to build out the electrical infront.

The next society level changes after AI will happen at an even faster speed. Maybe AI will become sentient, or, it will be harmful while not being intelligent, it will just have or take control of systems that humanity relies on. An AI that can do stock trades vs a competing AI will have unintended consequences.

If we can't easily predict what poem will come out if ChatGPT, how can we predict what it will do when AI is in control of something more important.