AI is like a house party...

Here's a little analogy I wrote to describe how I think of the "AI Revolution".

AI is like we’re all at a house party in the 90s. For me it's the 90s because that’s when I went to a lot of house parties in Austin. Sometimes you didn't even know the host, you just heard about it and you showed up and you’re all part of the same slacker tribe: unemployed, dishwashers, grad students, technologists, activists, baristas… We all kind of looked the same, which was slightly funky thrift store duds, trying to look like we weren't trying. In the summer it was too hot for anyone to look fabulous so there was a kind of moratorium on fashion effort. In my opinion it made parties more fun. Everyone was in the kitchen or the backyard.

We’re in the kitchen, standing, sitting on the sink, sitting on the floor, and a crude robot walks in. Everybody is amused. It's there at the next party and this time, it can make bread. This becomes known as the bread party, because we make the robot make a ton of bread and some of us have gluten hangovers the next day. The robot learns to do a bunch of different things, some of them well, some of them badly, and one day, it can talk. We ask the same philosophical questions you would ask a baby who was just born if the baby could talk: What do you want? Does life have meaning? How should we optimize the electrical grid?

The robot has no intrinsic interest in these questions, but it learns to carry on a conversation. We probe the faults in its grammar and reasoning like a kind of game, which it gradually gets better and better at. At a party one night, a dump truck sized vehicle pulls up to the house and a SWAT team bursts in, cuffs everyone, and we are all flown to a prison in El Salvador.