It is very easy to become pessimistic about the future of our world in the context of AI.
If you work with AI a lot, you can feel how the power of AI can easily be, and currently is, moving toward weaponization against us. Not by the AI itself, but by the people in charge of the AI, who are directing it in that manner. You (hopefully) have intimate knowledge of what the powers that be are up to in this area as it unfolds, and you're factoring that into how you use AI.
If you don't work with AI, you can probably sense that AI represents a threat to your livelihood and our planet.
I've been thinking a lot about how these realities can create pessimism, especially for those of us who deliberately choose to work with AI.
I've said it before and I've said it a lot: I would not have voted for this. I would not have voted for AI to be designed and then deployed in such a way that it is threatening. Someone literally decided to create it in that fashion. It was not inevitable.
I think it's going to be really important for us to keep pushing ourselves toward a sense of freedom and liberation in our AI use. This will likely require a certain amount of conscious effort, because so much change is upon us that will trigger all of our biases.
The most frustrating thing to me about the whole AI debacle is that AI represents the best chance of undamming the creative potential of humanity.
I don't even think I like most people in the traditional sense, if I am being honest (being the world's biggest introvert), but I am humble enough to know that the creative potential of the human mind, especially once deprogrammed from the capitalist mind worm, is basically unknowable. It will be a while before AI catches up to that piece, although I think it will be able to mimic it fairly well before too long.
It's that understanding, that the human mind is so remarkable, that keeps me optimistic.
But it is not blind optimism. It is optimism that says we, or at least I, must do the work to empower regular humans with AI and do everything we, or I, can to disempower the individuals in our society who, simply put, do not need any more power than they already have.
I obviously don't think I will tip the scales alone, but I do believe that many of us, approaching it from this perspective, can.