There’s no question that our world is going through an explosion of information. There will be even more books and more essays and more videos and more paintings and more, more, more of all sorts of things. The question is what will happen to the things that people produce?
I would like to propose that in general we’ll have a problem, but I want to propose one part that I think is interesting, bright, and hopeful. It’s the idea that consumption of information is influenced by who produced it. Think about a painting. Is the painting the same no matter who produced it, no matter what you know about the person, about the time in history? Of course it’s different. What about the poem? What about the bottle of wine?
The point is that a lot of time when we consume something, we also consume the background, the history, what came before, and then what became part of it. Think about one of my books (if you happen to have read one of them). When you read one of my books is it really independent of knowing something about me? I don’t think so. I think those things are connected. So, imagine you read one of my books and you either thought it was produced by AI or you thought it was produced by me and I told you some things about myself. Which one will be a more fulfilling consumption experience? Which one would you read more carefully? In which one would there be a paragraph that is less interesting, but you would say, “I’m trusting that this will be OK.”
I think that the person producing will still have an impact. Now, I think that’s important. It means that when I produce something, it has to be me. I can’t tell you that I created it when it was really AI. I think we need to differentiate between those things. But eventually I think that we will be surrounded by lots more. And I think we’ll have a choice. Do we consume things that are made by AI? I think then we will enter into a production mode. We will read as quickly as possible. Digesting. It’s not about enjoyment. It’s about processing. And then there’ll be a different mode. Consuming with some thought and appreciation and understanding of the person behind it. I think there’ll be both of those. I think we’ll have some consumption that will be just about quickness and efficiency. And some that will be about the value underneath it and the meaning that it gives. In those instances, I think we will read slower and enjoy and savor more, maybe even take more seriously.
So, I think we’ll have these two buckets. The question will be how much time do we spend in each of those buckets? How much time do we spend in the bucket of efficiency and how much time do we spend in the bucket that’s more meaningful? I think it will be hard to compete with AI producing things very, very quickly and very, very efficiently compared to human effort. But I think that we will still pay for good wine, good poetry, paintings that are made by a person, a movie that has a story behind it, good books, and so on. Maybe less than now, but I still think we will.
So, the bad news is that we’ll be absolutely bombarded by lots and lots of information. But I think the good news is that the information produced by humans will continue to have a story behind it, have a meaning, and I think we’ll treat it differently and enjoy it more.
That’s my prediction.
