Let’s Stop Being Afraid of AI
In this Wildcard Wednesday episode of Simple Joe, I’m talking about artificial intelligence and why I believe AI is ultimately just a tool, a very powerful one, but still a tool that we should learn to use instead of simply being afraid of. I share some of the ways I’m already using AI for research, organizing ideas, planning trips, solving problems around the house, developing business ideas, drafting emails, improving my work, and most importantly, defeating the blank page when I know there’s an idea in my head but I haven’t quite figured out how to express it yet. We also get into the legitimate concerns surrounding artificial intelligence, including jobs, privacy, data centers, energy and water use, misinformation, and the possibility that technology could make us intellectually lazy or even replace some of the human interaction we desperately need. My approach is simple: use AI to help you think, not to tell you what to think. Let it do some of the heavy lifting, but continue asking questions, verifying important information, staying curious, spending time with real people, getting outside, creating things, wandering, wondering, and living your actual life. I also talk about how AI has helped me rethink the Simple Joe production process after what was supposed to be a short break turned into seven months away from the show, allowing me to spend more time on the creative and human parts of podcasting that I love. Technology is going to keep changing, jobs and skills are going to change with it, and none of us knows exactly where artificial intelligence ultimately leads. But I know which side of that change I want to be on: learning the tool, understanding it, questioning it, and using it to create more room for the things only human beings can do. And if the robot overlords eventually take over anyway, I would just like the record to show that I’ve always been very nice to AI.
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