A.I. is the new ReggiesRush, and humanity is fumbling a little.

TL;DR

• I’m very pro-A.I.

• And I also think humanity is kind of overwhelmed with opportunity and possibility right now.

• It feels a bit like we’ve unleashed a tightly coiled spring, and that makes it really hard to predict where it  will bounce next, or even land (it’s also interesting that “it” could be us, or A.I.)

• I think there are risks in people commoditising their “A.I. expertise” so early in the game

• And I also think there are some interesting psychological impacts on humans with the very sudden explosion of capability and possibility in A.I.

Anyone remember the South African TV segment from the 2000s called ReggiesRush? Well, the concept was simple: Kids were lucky-drawn to be let loose in a toy store, and allowed to grab as many toys as they could in a given amount of time.

I remember catching inbetween Pokémon and Dragon Ball Z when I was younger, and holy cow it infuriated me (it’ll make sense why I’m bringing this up just now): These kids were given free reign inside a toy store, and most of them got so revved up that they fumbled, dropped, and tripped over the toys they were trying to throw into the trolley. So much so, that they often left with no more than a big plushie or a Hot Wheels car. Like... where’s the strategy, my dude?!

Anyway.

I had basically erased this rather insignificant portion of my childhood from my memory... until I was viscerally reminded of it, while watching humans interact with artificial intelligence (AI):

We are the kids, the opportunities of A.I. that we’re presented with is the toy-store, and we’re leaving an overturned trolley in our wake.

Almost overnight, the majority of the world suddenly had ChatGPT at their fingertips; and, almost overnight, most things that were very hard to do became possible for a toddler with an internet connection. You can now write a blog post, create a recipe, make world-class art, write code and publish a website... That’s an insane amount of possibility to get in a short space of time.

Quick sidenote: I feel it important to state at this point that I’m very pro-AI. I use it every day, and I firmly believe in the augmentative power it can have for human potential. Right now, I think it's interesting and important to reflect on our relationship with A.I., in order to make sure we’re progressing and not spiralling.

Part 1: Understanding “ReggiesRush-syndrome”

(I’m coining that btw...)

In order to make sense of this phenomenon, we need to touch on a few things first:

1. Evolution takes time

While A.I. isn't new, it's certainly picked up in popularity recently. Within the space of about two years, it not only became widely, publicly accessible, but also became accessible in things that we thought wouldn’t be threatened by A.I. for a while — things like art and creativity. DALL-E and Midjourney made the internet rounds pretty fast for their meme-able content, and ChatGPT followed suit pretty soon.

We aren’t strangers to rapid progress like this: The Industrial Revolution and the internet both shook the world’s existing structures, forcing everyone to adapt and change in pretty significant ways.

However, if the Industrial Revolution is the fastest car, A.I. is the speed of sound.

Biologically, humans aren’t wired for existential changes in our environment. We can respond to immediate threats —  jumping out the way of a truck, for example. But shifting to a high-paced, high-pressure, 9-5 working environment, mostly seated, over 40 years, is not something we can evolve to handle in a generation. Most living things take millennia to mutate in order to adapt to their changing environment.

Since things like the Industrial Revolution, humans have had to deal with immense selective pressures to keep up to the changing world — physically, but also mentally. So, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we feel so burnt-out as a species, being bombarded with self-help and growth books from every angle, and needing to constantly shift our lives around new tech, new routines, new industries, new ways of working...

Our physiologically is literally not able to change that quickly.

2. We tend towards immediate satisfaction

Humans in general aren’t great at this long-term thinking. Our world is designed to draw out this desire for immediate joy, because humans who wait don’t spend as much money, time, or attention on things: “Buy now!”, 10-second viral video trends, ads upon ads upon ads, bright neon-lit signs...

We want the dopamine hit so badly, that we’ll worry about the consequences later.

With junk food, this is relatively trivial. With drinking, this could be a bad idea. And with A.I., this is potentially pretty disastrous.

But I’m getting ahead of myself...

3. Too many choices freak us out

Another thing to consider is decision fatigue: Too many options, and we’re left feeling stuck. It can freak us out, and we become incapacitated. There seems to be a sweet spot in every context for making a confident, well-thought out decision.

One particular impact of decision fatigue is that it can make us incredibly reactive. When you’re standing in line at a takeaway restaurant, and there are 80 different smoothie choices, we’ll tend to think for a while, get increasingly frustrated, and eventually pick one at random (or ask the cashier to recommend one for us).

Having lots of choice is great. It’s definitely better than having no choice at all. But too much, and our cognitive functions break down.

4. A.I. is still a big, black box...

Even though A.I. is this cool thing we’ve developed, no one really understands how it works. It’s called a black box model, and scientists hand-wave a lot of this because they’re undeniably powerful and useful, and explaining exactly how they work isn’t as useful as just using them. AlphaFold, for example, is game-changing for protein folding and scientific research.

The problem comes when we risk stopping to ask the important questions. OpenAI emphasises that ChatGPT will make stuff up before it says “I don’t know.” But it seems so impressive that most people just trust it outright.

“When we put our trust in a system simply because it gives us answers that fit what we are looking for, we fail to ask key questions: Are these responses reliable, or do they just tell us what we want to hear? Whom do the results ultimately benefit? And who is responsible if it causes harm?” - Chloe Xiang, for Vice

Part 2: Put it all together...

...And you get the "ReggiesRush-syndrome": Humans were given the tools to do almost anything, and lots of things that they haven't been able to do before. Now, we’re frantically scrambling in a toy store, with little concern for what happens afterwards, and not really critiquing the toys we’re picking up along the way.

People are releasing thousands of A.I. apps a day, companies are racing to be the first to release “the next big thing” in A.I., and we’re (unsurprisingly) seeing calls to slow everything down.

Already, we’ve seen data leaks, as well as people creating microwaves that want to annihilate their owners (and I’ll mention that I’m exaggerating here to make a point; all of these things highlight less-so the catastrophic, and more-so the fascinating sides to AI that we hadn’t yet understood).

Part 3: But, so what?

The social impact

The first implication of ReggiesRush-syndrome is the Dunning-Kruger effect: People thinking they’re experts, when they haven’t even scraped the surface.

Just look at what happened with the 2008 financial crisis: In the years leading up to 2008, many financial experts believed that the housing market was stable and that the risk of a financial collapse was low. However, the collapse of the housing market led to a global financial crisis that resulted in millions of job losses and widespread economic hardship.

ChatGPT is really fantastic, but I’ve seen enough “99% of your prompts are WRONG if you don’t do this!” headlines on LinkedIn to know that this is more hype than reason. And I’m pretty sure lots of people actually think they’ve cracked something genuine...

But it’s hard for me to accept that “Geoff” is qualified enough to lead the way with A.I., when global powers are discussing its impacts, Sam Harris has 2-hour long debates with scientists on his podcast (sans consensus), and companies like Google are still getting things wrong.

The psychological impact

Secondly, and more insiduously, we get ever more anxious human beings. Flooded with all this opportunity and potential at our fingertips after decades of it not being possible, is essentially like suddenly being told you can run through a toy shop and grab anything you want in 30 seconds.

AHH! CHAOS!

We are incapacitated with the amount of stuff being built, being published, being created, being thrown at us... and that’s already without A.I.! Add a supercharged piece of technology into the mix, and you get a group of humans stuck in a state of complete overwhelm.

We’ll be less productive, more anxious, less confident in trial-and-error approaches (because now the stakes feel higher, if not existential)... it could turn into a complete shit-show.

Part 4: The silver lining

Hey, at the end of it all, we’re still in a pretty epic toy store. The problem with ReggiesRush-syndrome is not that we’re playing with A.I., but that we’re fumbling. And the cure for that is... well... to stop fumbling.

There are many obvious positives to the opportunities in A.I — just look at everything being built and posted on sites like theresanaiforthat.com. Then, there’s DeepMind who have developed AlphaFold, which is breaking insane scientific ground on protein folding (something which is insanely complex) on a level we would take years to reach without the help of artificial intelligence.

But I do think it would be a useful step to meditate on what each of us as individuals wants to achieve with this stuff. Not as humanity, but like as YOU reading this. What do YOU want out of A.I.?

I think that by interrogating it on a micro-level first (taking stock of your own toy box, and seeing what you actually want to grab when you get into the toy store), is a useful first step to then figure out what society needs. In the words of RuPaul: “If you can’t think about A.I. for yourself, how the hell are you gonna think about A.I. for somebody else? (Can I get an amen?!)”

I even just think you reading articles like this, and talking about this stuff, and playing with A.I. on every level (safely), is really the best thing we can be doing right now to better understand and learn about this wonderfully scary and amazing thing.

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