Familiar Daemons

It’s probably true to say that many of the turning points in human history passed unnoticed by those who lived through them. Nobody woke up one morning and was startled to find that the Roman Empire had fallen. The Fall wasn’t a discrete event, but a long decline that spanned decades or centuries. And while intense events like world wars are difficult to overlook, if you’re in the middle of one it’s hard to say exactly which direction history might be taking.

But I would cautiously suggest that we might now be at some kind of inflection point, a time when we can see a “before” and “after.” We know that the “after” is going to be very different from the “before,” even if we don’t yet know precisely what shape it will take. And it’s because of the thing we’re calling “AI.”