Getting used to technological miracles

We've learned to take technological miracles for granted faster than people can create them.

In 1997, Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov in a chess match. At the time, it was a world event. A machine had defeated a human in a game that, for centuries, had been seen as one of the great expressions of human intelligence.

People soon found an explanation. Chess is just a matter of searching through possibilities, they said. When a computer can talk to a person and write meaningful text, then we can discuss real intelligence.

In 2022, ChatGPT appeared. Suddenly almost anyone could talk to a machine in ordinary language: ask it to explain something complicated, write code, invent a story or solve a problem.

Everyone was amazed. It felt as though we had finally arrived in the future.

A few years pass. And what happens?

We're already dissatisfied with the way AI writes. We're irritated when it makes coding mistakes. We complain that it can't independently complete some difficult task.

We've almost stopped noticing what it can do. We are interested only in what it can't do yet.

There is even a name for this: the AI effect.

Every time a machine learns an ability we once considered uniquely human, we stop seeing that ability as a real expression of intelligence.

We keep moving the finish line.

A chess-playing machine used to seem like science fiction. Today it's an ordinary programme. Talking to a computer as if it were a person used to seem like science fiction. Today we're angry when it doesn't understand us well enough.

Now we're saying real AI will arrive only when it can carry out research independently, create companies, make discoveries and do work better than a human.

But I suspect that even when those things happen, we'll get used to them fairly quickly and say they aren't particularly remarkable either.

There is another feature of our minds at work here. We adapt to good things incredibly quickly. What inspired awe yesterday becomes normal today and inadequate tomorrow.

I keep thinking about how strange that is.

We live in a future we were dreaming about only a few years ago. Instead of being astonished by it, we're already complaining that it isn't good enough.

That may be one of humanity's best and strangest qualities at the same time.

We are never entirely satisfied with what we've created. That is precisely why we keep creating new things.

Still, sometimes it is worth stopping to notice just how extraordinary the things we now consider ordinary really are.

P.S. I think I managed to connect this one quite nicely to the previous post.