Technology as Replacement vs as Multiplier

You could write something down to help you memorise it if that’s your aim, or you can write something down to give yourself an excuse to stop thinking about or trying to remember it.

You can respond to the easy availability of food in supermarkets, accessible by motorised transport by saving time and money, or you can respond by eating too many calories and walking too little.

Most of us (myself included, I’m not judging people) don’t just react purely in one way or the other, but in some mixture of the two. We don’t need to demand perfection but it’s important to remember that technology can be a great multiplier of whatever effort we are willing and able to put in, and can even help in training to make us stronger or more capable, but when treated mostly as a replacement or substitute for human effort it tends to make us weaker. We start outsourcing parts of ourselves.

Easy access to maps, facts, calculation. All great things, and it’s easy to see how one could use them to learn an area better, or learn facts about any subject, or to practice and test their mental arithmetic. It’s also all too easy to see how one might be tempted to outsource their mental efforts in these areas so habitually that one becomes less knowledgeable and less skilled in a way that diminishes their mind and experience of life.

This dichotomy applies not only to how we’ll use advanced, general AI but also how people are debating its future. Worrying about jobs being lost is focusing on technology as a replacement for human efforts. Dreams of an explosion in productivity are focusing on technology as a multiplier of effort instead.

I expect the truth is there will be a combination of both approaches, whether considered individually or across society as a whole. But we might at least aim to remember this dichotomy and lean more on the multiplier side.

I believe one useful mnemonic is to think of AI as a multiplier of minutes more than anything else. You are still the one who has to ultimately do the job including the vision, planning, prioritising, learning, understanding, remembering, judging, and adapting, but each minute you spend might be multiplied (in its productive effects) by some numerical factor, due to smart machines.

Maybe in some cases it’s only a 10% improvement, maybe its 10,000% so that you’re a hundred times as productive per minute in whatever that task is, but in any case you’re still the owner and director of the task from start to finish. You don’t get to sit down and watch, you just get to finish sooner and decide what to do with your time next.