There’s something that bothers me about the chatter that AI is making “intelligence” ubiquitous. For example, in a recent Bloomberg article, “AI Will Upend a Basic Assumption About How Companies Are Organized,” Azeem Azhar wrote:
As intelligence becomes cheaper and faster, the basic assumption underpinning our institutions—that human insight is scarce and expensive—no longer holds. When you can effectively consult a dozen experts anytime you like, it changes how companies organize, how we innovate and how each of us approaches learning and decision-making. The question facing individuals and organizations alike is: What will you do when intelligence itself is suddenly ubiquitous and practically free?
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Is it really intelligence that is becoming ubiquitous and practically free? What we consider to be the pinnacle of human intelligence is the ability to see what everyone else sees, to learn what everyone else has learned, and yet to see something that no one else was able to see. Or to see something completely unfamiliar and make sense of it, without prior knowledge. In a bold stroke, to remake the world. The creators of AI have displayed that kind of intelligence. Their creations, not so much. As AI pioneer François Chollet put it, intelligence is more than a collection of task specific skills. In fact, he noted, “unlimited priors or experience can produce systems with little-to-no generalization power (or intelligence) that exhibit high skill at any number of tasks.”
I do agree with Azeem, though, that even today’s not yet truly intelligent AI is profoundly disruptive. There are indeed big questions facing individuals and organizations, but we need to make sure that they are the right questions.
I have a lot of thoughts about what is going to change because of the abundance of expertise provided by AI, which I will write about at another time. What I want to talk about now, though, is inspired by the very wise advice once given by Jeff Bezos, which is to ask what will not change. In short, if it is not truly intelligence but merely expertise that is being commoditized, we need to ask what elements of intelligence are still unique and valuable.
I posit that at least one answer is rooted in human creativity, values, and taste. Consider what happened during the PC revolution. During the mainframe era, computers had been scarce and expensive. Suddenly, they were cheap and ubiquitous. There could be “a PC on every desk and in every home” (and eventually in every hand). In short, computers had become a commodity. There were winners like Bill Gates, who understood that control over the software operating system would be a source of monopoly profits; Andy Grove of Intel, who figured out that getting control of one key hardware component in an otherwise commodified system became a source of outsized power; and Michael Dell, who rode the wave of hardware commoditization to success by becoming the best at configuring and delivering standardized PCs to the masses. Each of them, in their way, figured out something about how the world was changing.
But only one of the personal computer pioneers rooted his company’s business strategy in something that would not change: the human desire to distinguish oneself from peers by the values that you express through your choices. He understood that in commodity markets, brands stand out when they mean something.
Art critic Dave Hickey explained this idea brilliantly when writing about the rise to dominance of General Motors after World War II. Harley Earl, its VP of styling, built a ladder of status from Chevrolet to Pontiac to Cadillac and changed automobile designs every year so that the latest model became an object of desire. As Hickey put it, the automobile became an “art market,” in which “products are sold on the basis of what they mean, not just what they do.” Steve Jobs didn’t create the famous 1984 ad that threw down the gauntlet to the PC. (It was Steve Hayden, Brent Thomas, and Lee Clow at Chiat/Day who came up with the concept, and the ad itself was directed by Ridley Scott.) But like the Mac itself, and later the iPhone, it was unquestionably a reflection of Steve’s unique mix of creativity, values, and taste.
Whatever changes AI brings to the world, I suspect that those three things—creativity, values, and taste—will remain a constant in human societies and economies.
Abundant expertise may be the booby prize when that expertise is based on consensus opinion, which, by the nature of LLMs, is their strong suit. This came home to me vividly when I read a paper that outlined how when ChatGPT was asked to design a website, it built one that included many dark patterns. Why? Much of the code ChatGPT was trained on implemented those dark patterns. Unfortunately neither ChatGPT nor those prompting it had the sense to realize that the websites it had learned from had been enshittified (to use Cory Doctorow’s marvelous turn of phrase).
It is the ability to decide what is new and unexpected and to shape what matters to people that is the heart of creative intelligence, not just in the arts but in business and in politics. At least until AI wakes up in the morning and decides what it is going to do (i.e., we have invented artificial volition as well as artificial intelligence), it will be directed by humans. As I wrote in WTF, AI is a powerful genie that does what we ask it to do, which is not necessarily what we actually want. Every story about genies revolves around the inability of those given the magic wishes to wish for the right thing. The art of asking is everything. That is, the future belongs to those who are exercising the intelligence and insight that AI itself does not have. As Steve Jobs said (actually channeling the creativity of Chiat/Day’s Craig Tanimoto), “Think different.”
Bringing this around to the choices that we make at O’Reilly, I like to point out that the experts you find on the O’Reilly platform are not just a repository of knowledge and expertise. Through their writings, videos, and live interactions with customers on the platform, they also bring to bear unique values and points of view.
And so, as we build our own AI-based services, we are leaning into not just the knowledge of our experts but their values, and our own. We like to think our experts don’t just tell you how to do something. They tell you how to do it right. They don’t just teach you what they know. They teach you how to think.
On May 8, O’Reilly Media will be hosting Coding with AI: The End of Software Development as We Know It—a live virtual tech conference spotlighting how AI is already supercharging developers, boosting productivity, and providing real value to their organizations. If you’re in the trenches building tomorrow’s development practices today and interested in speaking at the event, we’d love to hear from you by March 12. You can find more information and our call for presentations here. Just want to attend? Register for free here.