The thing about cults is that they don’t look like cults from the inside, only from the outside. From the inside, they look like an oasis of normality in the world of madness.
Here's my hot take: Yes, you probably are in a cult. AI, like the other tech hype products of the last decade or so, suffers from a fundamental problem right now. It's all promises of what it might be or what it could do if it becomes something better in the future. Nobody is currently selling an AI product right now that is meaningfully useful beyond novelty. There are however many people selling the service of trying to help businesses leverage the vague idea of AI to "do something useful."
Once I see the first product that actually replaces someone or changes the foundation of work I'll be worried but until then it stays in the same part of my mind as Big Data, BlockChains, Digital Thread, Metaverse, etc. Technologies that may or may not be useful in niche use cases but in no way transformative on the level prosletizers claim they are.
It is meaningfully useful to me personally and many I know. I'm absolutely amazed I'm paying £20/month for the value I'm getting from ChatGPT or Claude. The reason AI products like Cursor has $200M+ is ARR is because it's useful to countless people already today. Clay.ai is super-useful today to countless salespeople. DeepL uses AI for (excellent) translation. Everyone I know swears by Granola and WisprFlow: not as a novelty but day to day tools. This not to mention that AI tech is quietly inside every popular product making it better: Figma, Instagram, Canva, etc. I could go on and on: it's not future, it's already here.
The claim "Nobody is currently selling an AI product right now that is meaningfully useful beyond novelty" is just factually incorrect based on what I'm seeing in the industry.
Ok, so it's useful as a productivity tool in some industries and seems to be a better "Instagram algorithm" than the algorithm that already existed. Neither of those things is world changing.
None of what you just said in any way implies a society reading end of usefulness for human workers or any other wild disturbance. Being a useful productivity tool puts AI in the same category as Microsoft Word, which obviously didn't redefine society as a whole even if typists lost thier career after it came out.
I see what you mean now. If things stayed at they are, you'd be right, but the technology is on an exponential growth trajectory. E.g. if my body temperature increases by 0.1ºC every day, I won't feel any problem for a few days but soon I'd be dead. A crude analogy, but still.
A very detailed, but accessible analysis of this question in this book: https://the-coming-wave.com/ I can't recommend it highly enough. If you read and disagree — fair enough, but it's worth hearing the argument.
I am well aware of the "exponential growth" argument about AI. I am equally aware that the same/similar arguments were made for blockchsins, big data, digital twin, digital thread, meta verse, etc.
Extrapolation is a very risky prediction tool precisely because the current trajectory isn't evidence of future trajectory nor does it say anything about the real limits of a technology.
I am not making a definitive statement that AI is a giant fraud or anything. I'm just saying that until someone shows me something that isn't a neat productivity tool or "slightly better spotify algorithm " im not going to take claims of it ending society as we know it seriously. Those claims are pure imagination and should be treated as such given the tech industry's past of making these claims to hype products.
I'm sorry I assumed you weren't familiar with the exponential argument. I should have asked.
Overall, I think time will tell. As I've said, I'm struggling to make accurate predictions, but I'll be surprised if things stay substantially the same.
The question you should be asking is why do you assume current "exponential growth" means "exponential growth in the direction i have picked using my imagination"
For example: why would exponential growth in generative AI lead to AGI rather than just exponentially faster generative AI speeds? It is not rational that a complex algorithm that predicts the next letter of a sentence based on reading a huge amount of existing documents would somehow become sentient and be able to deduct information or consider contexts it was never trained on. You have to provide evidence that this is possible, much less likely, rather than just imagining something sensational and leaning on "exponential growth" to paper over the argument.
My doubts come from ~15 years of work experience with these new tech hype products. They all contain the same markers. There is one use case that at least superficially makes sense, a lot of hype, and nobody selling a finished product that the seller already knows how to implement to improve a business. Instead they expect you to pay them "to work with you" to figure out how "new hype thing" could maybe do "some vague beneficial idea" for a business.
If it's any consolation, there are lots of Substackers who are also cult members, including me.
This made me think!
In your mission to try and "make sense of AI, future of work and human condition", this essay hasn't moved you very far forward...
I’ve much to learn!
Here's my hot take: Yes, you probably are in a cult. AI, like the other tech hype products of the last decade or so, suffers from a fundamental problem right now. It's all promises of what it might be or what it could do if it becomes something better in the future. Nobody is currently selling an AI product right now that is meaningfully useful beyond novelty. There are however many people selling the service of trying to help businesses leverage the vague idea of AI to "do something useful."
Once I see the first product that actually replaces someone or changes the foundation of work I'll be worried but until then it stays in the same part of my mind as Big Data, BlockChains, Digital Thread, Metaverse, etc. Technologies that may or may not be useful in niche use cases but in no way transformative on the level prosletizers claim they are.
It is meaningfully useful to me personally and many I know. I'm absolutely amazed I'm paying £20/month for the value I'm getting from ChatGPT or Claude. The reason AI products like Cursor has $200M+ is ARR is because it's useful to countless people already today. Clay.ai is super-useful today to countless salespeople. DeepL uses AI for (excellent) translation. Everyone I know swears by Granola and WisprFlow: not as a novelty but day to day tools. This not to mention that AI tech is quietly inside every popular product making it better: Figma, Instagram, Canva, etc. I could go on and on: it's not future, it's already here.
The claim "Nobody is currently selling an AI product right now that is meaningfully useful beyond novelty" is just factually incorrect based on what I'm seeing in the industry.
Ok, so it's useful as a productivity tool in some industries and seems to be a better "Instagram algorithm" than the algorithm that already existed. Neither of those things is world changing.
None of what you just said in any way implies a society reading end of usefulness for human workers or any other wild disturbance. Being a useful productivity tool puts AI in the same category as Microsoft Word, which obviously didn't redefine society as a whole even if typists lost thier career after it came out.
I see what you mean now. If things stayed at they are, you'd be right, but the technology is on an exponential growth trajectory. E.g. if my body temperature increases by 0.1ºC every day, I won't feel any problem for a few days but soon I'd be dead. A crude analogy, but still.
A very detailed, but accessible analysis of this question in this book: https://the-coming-wave.com/ I can't recommend it highly enough. If you read and disagree — fair enough, but it's worth hearing the argument.
I am well aware of the "exponential growth" argument about AI. I am equally aware that the same/similar arguments were made for blockchsins, big data, digital twin, digital thread, meta verse, etc.
Extrapolation is a very risky prediction tool precisely because the current trajectory isn't evidence of future trajectory nor does it say anything about the real limits of a technology.
I am not making a definitive statement that AI is a giant fraud or anything. I'm just saying that until someone shows me something that isn't a neat productivity tool or "slightly better spotify algorithm " im not going to take claims of it ending society as we know it seriously. Those claims are pure imagination and should be treated as such given the tech industry's past of making these claims to hype products.
I'm sorry I assumed you weren't familiar with the exponential argument. I should have asked.
Overall, I think time will tell. As I've said, I'm struggling to make accurate predictions, but I'll be surprised if things stay substantially the same.
The question you should be asking is why do you assume current "exponential growth" means "exponential growth in the direction i have picked using my imagination"
For example: why would exponential growth in generative AI lead to AGI rather than just exponentially faster generative AI speeds? It is not rational that a complex algorithm that predicts the next letter of a sentence based on reading a huge amount of existing documents would somehow become sentient and be able to deduct information or consider contexts it was never trained on. You have to provide evidence that this is possible, much less likely, rather than just imagining something sensational and leaning on "exponential growth" to paper over the argument.
My doubts come from ~15 years of work experience with these new tech hype products. They all contain the same markers. There is one use case that at least superficially makes sense, a lot of hype, and nobody selling a finished product that the seller already knows how to implement to improve a business. Instead they expect you to pay them "to work with you" to figure out how "new hype thing" could maybe do "some vague beneficial idea" for a business.