AI Isn’t Going to Save Us, and It Won’t Make Us Happy
Happiness doesn’t grow on chips and AI doesn’t really care about us.
It's hard to ignore all the buzz about AI. Some people have been made rich off of AI. I guess they get the buzz, and apparently, I’m not one of those people.
I didn’t go to the right school. I don’t know the right people. I don’t intend to use AI for much, but it seems to be everywhere I want to be when I’m online. It’s making decisions for me, but the one thing it can’t do is make me happy.
I think about happiness often. I’m not sure that artificial intelligence, or AI for short, is going to make me or anyone else happy. I’m confident that AI will perform wonderful and magical works of art, do some cool tasks, and write some nice puns. I see it as a public utility, something that all of us can use if we want to. But we have to decide to want to use it. And even then, we have to decide if what AI does is something to be happy about.
Happiness is not a passive experience. Happiness requires a constant stream of decisions to attain and even maintain a state of happiness. We are not designed to be happy all of the time. Our experience is not one of a river of constant joy because our brains are designed to wander.
