Clay Shirky, “Living with AI Discombobulation” hosted by HLS and Ostrom Workshop

Small technological changes can make life better or worse. Anti-lock brakes are good, robocalls bad. Big changes – automobiles, the internet, smartphones, now AI – make life weirder. With large-scale change, it becomes impossible to say if things have gotten better or worse, because the technology upends old benchmarks.

Generative AI can easily generate office memos or spam. However, it can also clone voices, evolve behaviors, confidently explain non-existent memes, and create pictures of the Pope rocking a white puffer good enough to fool people.

Away from the ‘3 day workweek/AI will kill us all’ predictions, the most surprising near-term uses of AI will not be good or bad so much as discombobulating. What can we expect in a world where unexpected new skills have become widely available?