Fear not! AI is already taking over. Any debate is moot. It’s not done, and there isn’t much we can do about it. Congratulate yourself on adapting so well, so far.

AI is not AI is not AI. There are many levels of AI, and we’ve already met the earliest models of them. Think automation. Compare life from fifty years ago to now. We’re using lots of things that are at least somewhat intelligent. A coffee maker isn’t an ideal of artificial intelligence, but it is smart enough to take your commands, brew the coffee, and turn itself off – and maybe stay on just to keep it warm. ‘That’s not AI.’ No, but yes, at least at the level of a toddler savant. 

A coffeemaker is not an ultimate AI, but it is a start.

Spell check is just looking up what you typed against a dictionary. But spell check has to use some intelligence to guess at which word you really wanted. Now, it has graduated to grammar check. It can even have opinions about tone and measures of reading level.

Spell check wasn’t doing the writing, but it can now. And, it is getting better.

Cars are things. We drive them. But, since the introduction of power steering and power braking, our driving has been assisting. That may be a built-in response, but then we upgraded to cruise control, and anti-skid, and power-sharing in 4WD, and now lane-assist, separation distancing, auto parallel parking, and features I’m not familiar with because my car isn’t that fancy. Auto-start? Come-when-you-call? Autonomous operations? Cars have advanced far enough that owners have given up control of maintenance, and mechanics have to trust the computer about what to work on before a human hand does more than open the hood.

Auto automation is not waiting for the ultimate AI; it is doing what it can do with what it has.

Thank the Baby Boom age for what happened to the home. There were some labor saving devices prior to World War II, but soon after peace, the machines began to need user manuals. Now, washing machines are smart enough to confuse users about what cycle to use and why. Ovens and cooktops have safety features that make sure we don’t hurt ourselves, evidently because they take better care of us than we do. Now, so many of them are so intelligent that they can tell us what to shop for. Train yourself on their new language of timers and beepers to draw attention back to their/our task. 

We’ve come a long way from fires for cooking and streams for water, largely because of the increasingly smart systems we’ve created.

For centuries, the most common non-human security system was a dog, or even better, dogs. Maybe some geese. Now, we don’t even have to get up to get the door, or even be home to talk with someone who walked onto the porch – or back door, or into a garage where they shouldn’t be, or… There are systems that detect people and critters, launch a drone, and give you a real-time video of what is happening. These are not dumb systems, but they are getting smarter. Our habits are unique and preditable enough that the sensors can identify the people and the pets, and notify us if something or someone is unfamiliar. Lock or unlock the house without being in the same time zone.

A somewhat intelligent entity is now a gatekeeper, concierge, and guardian at the gate. 

Words were pen and paper. Photos were click and shoot and develop and print. Neither now exist without at least the opportunity to be corrected and improved according to points of style that relied on humans before.

How many people would get lost without GPS?

Voicemail menues and Help bots try to outguess what we want and need. They may save companies money. They may ruin consumer approval. They can be dangerously wrong, but they are young and maturing.

Resumes are read by bots before humans see a few of the total.

Ads aren’t broadcast but are selectively provided based on intelligent guesses based on our recent activities. Spooky.

Doctors, even at the sophisticated level of surgeons, are tapping electronic databases instead of educated and experienced humans. We give them the power.

“I Am Not A Robot”, and the burden of proof is on the human while the power is in the machine.

And then, there’s true Artificial Intelligence. What I’ve written above this paragraph is a series of nuanced interpretations of intelligence. Power steering didn’t start as intelligence, but by design, intelligence was incorporated into something that wasn’t human. We’re done that throughout our culture and civilization. 

One simplistic way to typify Artificial Intelligence is to embody the necessary skills and actions of a human into a machine. We’ve been advancing that front for decades. Rather than worry about the arrival of AI, recognize that we’ve been enabling it throughout our lives. 

Humans are all part of a wide spectrum of skills and actions. None of us can do it all. No regular, stereoptypical AI can do it all. Some of us are great mechanics, but not most of us. An AI can be great at one thing, or a few things, but may not be able to do something some other AI can do.

AI has been arriving like a rising tide. I expect jobs to be lost and industries to fade away, but that has always been the case.

The AI I think is more valid to worry about is the AI that comes after the early AIs. Programmers are already losing control, or at least an understanding of AIs. When AIs start creating better AIs, even ‘our’ AIs may not be able to understand what has happened, what it’s motivations are, and what its intent might be.

That’s the AI that is more than an unknown, it is an unknowable unknown. And, there’s a chance that it will arrive within the period of a mortgage, a career, and definitely a lifetime.

So, here’s the potential personal finance bent on this topic. What do you do about it? For those of us not in the industry, the topic is not academic. I ask myself whether my investments will make sense in an AI-dominated world. 

The same question applies to my lifestyle. I’m glad I moved to a simple tiny house. As simple as it is, little lights populate the night. One caveman image was of someone sitting by a fire at night, ringed with the glowing eyes of creatures watching the human that is huddled by the fire’s security. My nightly walk to the kitchen is accompanied by one-eyed LEDs showing that many somethings await. Fortunately, they are less likely to attack.

And, what if they break? My area underwent an internet outage last night. I planned on working on my book (the sequel to Firewatcher), but I managed to go dancing instead. But that also means I’d doing more work on a Saturday.  Those few hours were critical to some, undoubtedly, but they were an inconvenience to most, at most.

We’ve been driving ourselves to a world where we’re more integrated and automated, and more vulnerable to everything working. Reliability and sustainability are not as valued in the economy as new regardless of improved. Maybe an AI will be smart enough to properly prioritize things without the distraction of human emotions.

Maybe we’ll embrace the impartiality of AI protection, AI justice, AI elected offcials, etc. It might take much from where we are to advance AI to the point that we relinguish control on such systems in an attempt to remove bias and injustice.

We’ve been riding this tide for decades. I doubt we can stop now.

In terms of investing and lifestyle, I take AI as a given. It is going to happen because we’ve been making it happen for a very long time. I haven’t reduced my considerations to a short, concise set of strategies, but I think there’s real non-academic value to adjusting my life given that assumption. I’ve got the tiny house; how about the large lot of land to go with it? Maybe I should as an AI for help.

(Irony: I now tend to have Grammarly review and suggest edits to my writing. I don’t blindly accept its direction. As a writer, it is still young. But, I can already see that I’m becoming a bit antiquated by picking my own words, breaking rules to make a point, and trying to be more human in my writing. Welcome to the new world.)