Opinion | We Spoke With 5 People Who Work With A.I. Here’s What Keeps Them Up at Night.

Human minds are static. They don’t improve much. A.I. gets better every day. More memory. Faster. More efficient. Doesn’t repeat the same mistakes.

If another A.I. somewhere learns something, they can quickly share that information.

Like the difference between an ant and a human. An ant cannot fully comprehend what we’re doing.

Quantum physics is just beyond its capabilities.

A human mind is capable of doing so much more than an A.I. system.

For one, we’re capable of learning and adjusting our own mental models in real time.

That’s something an artificial intelligence system cannot do unless there is a human being or a system assisting it.

The goal of a lot of practitioners in artificial intelligence is to create what’s known as A.G.I., artificial general intelligence.

Essentially, A.I. that thinks and acts just like a human.

But I actually believe that there is something fundamental, there is a spark of humanity in people that really is impossible to replicate in a machine.

And sometimes religious people will call that your soul. Other people may call that a consciousness.

Whatever it is, there is something special and different about people that we can’t actually replicate in a technical system.

The best analogy would be: What the steam engine was to the muscle, A.I. is to the brain.

Almost all adults worked in farming. Ninety percent of Europeans were farmers.

And now it’s, like, 2 percent because we have machines that are powerful and we have chemistry and all these wonderful things.

What happened to people? Well, we all went into offices. We started doing mental work.

We became accountants, judges, medical doctors, TV anchors, pilots — jobs that never existed before — software engineers. And now, now that stuff can be done by A.I.

Imagine that it can do a year’s worth of work in one day.

But more importantly, every job that we have, from pilot to accountant to lawyer, we train decades to become really proficient and really, really good.

And then we take that expertise with pride and apply it, over and over, every single day, the same thing.

We spent our first 18 years going through the school system, and hopefully with a high school diploma.

So if you have to translate something, if you have to write a term paper, do some research, if you have to write a poem,

if you do math — like, I don’t know, factoring, polynomials, the stuff we all hate — you just give it to ChatGPT 3, and there it is. So it’ll pass high school.

And then, if you go a little bit further and you take a marketing degree, even, like, a law degree, it kind of passes that, too. GPT 4 does.

So now we are in a world where A.I. can do what most Americans can do. And that’s really interesting.

Because you might think, “My God, that’s threatening. One computer can replace us all.”

And there’s some truth to this in the sense that a couple of machines replaced most farmers.

But was the world better off with us doing farming day in, day out? I don’t think so.

I think we have a symbiosis. A.I. will work with us; we will work with A.I.

We will be so much stronger as people by getting rid of some of the mundane stuff that’s, in some sense, actually quite boring to me

and are able to unfold our creativity, our intellect, our curiosity into ways that we can’t even imagine.

If you consider human history, we’ve been legendarily terrible at recognizing intelligence and offering it compassion

even when it comes in the form of another human.

Think of all the terrible things we’ve done to each other because of the colors of our skin, the languages we speak, the gods we worship.

So even when something is very clearly human, we often — still, to this day — refuse to acknowledge it as a fellow intelligent being.

Making a chatbot, it’s kind of like I’m trying to make this human mind that is reminiscent of my family’s ideas of what it means to be.

And I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m just informing this other weird generation.

And though I should not anthropomorphize it, it’s hard to not think of it as a fourth generation that’s kind of a child that you’re training up.

What information do you give this thing so that it functions well within a society?