These lines are very difficult for me to write because I feel like digging my own grave. AI systems are improving by leaps and bounds. From the early 2022 fumbling release of ChatGPT, which couldn’t correctly count the number of a’s in my name (it claimed two), we reached OpenAI’s release of math papers where an internal AI model solved many hundreds of previously open math problems. Aside from philosophical arguments, practical claims regarding the superiority of human thought, on grounds such as hallucinations or bias, increasingly appear to me like rearguard defence. For the bulk of today’s cognitive work, the writing’s on the wall: AI will take over.
The three factors driving AI’s dominance in the modern work environment are better performance, lower cost, and higher availability. The performance of AI models is rising spectacularly on all fronts: perception, knowledge processing and creation, reasoning, judgement, and autonomous action. In parallel, human proficiency in key information-processing skills, low on average among adults, is even declining among students. Consequently, AI systems are performing better than humans in ever-wider range of tasks.
