Confronting Impossible Futures

But doing nothing has a number of issues. First, it ignores the very real fact that we do not need any further advances in AI technology to see years of future disruption. Right now, AI systems are not well-integrated into businesses and organizations, something that will continue to improve even if LLM technology stops developing

To turn on artifacts, you simply have to click the initial in the bottom left, select feature preview, then turn on artifacts. Intuitive! For Code Interpreter, you have to remember to ask the AI to “use code” or sometimes it forgets

it is kind of surprising that none of the major AI labs seem to have put out any deep documentation aimed at non-specialists. There are some guides for programmers or serious prompt engineers, but remarkably little aimed at non-technical folks who actually want to use these systems to do stuff - the vast majority of users

t doesn’t help that the two most impressive implementations of AI for real work - Claude’s artifacts and ChatGPT’s Code Interpreter - are often hidden and opaque

To the extent that people do use AI tools for real work, it is often through something like an application copilot. These are all built to offer a “safe” way to use AI at work, and as such are often very limited compared to what a frontier model can do.

Despite planning horizons that often stretch a decade or more, very few organizations are seriously accounting for the possibility of continued AI improvement in their strategic planning.

Create an interactive simulation that explains the concepts behind Kuhn's theory of scientific revolutions in an engaging way to build a working game that explains core concepts from the historian of science, someone pointed out (quite rightly) that the simulation did not take into account Kuhn’s view that scientific revolutions are not always valu... See more

I isn’t ready to be an entrepreneur, but its ideation-prototype-interview cycle does in a couple of seconds what takes my students months to do. AI isn’t ready to build educational games without errors, but it is able to instantly make an interactive simulation that explains a difficult concept, even if some nuance is missing

As one example, I showed that Claude can get remarkably far as an entirely automated entrepreneur with the prompt: think step-by-step. generate 20 ideas for an app aimed at HR professionals. then evaluate and pick the best one that would make a good visual app. build a playable prototype of that. interview me as a potential customer about the proto... See more