As I walked into the hills at dawn I knew that there was a synthetic mind working on my behalf. Multiple minds, in fact. Because before I’d started my hike I had sat in a coffee shop and set a bunch of research agents to work. And now while I hiked I knew that machines were reading literally thousands of research papers on my behalf and diligently compiling data, cross-referencing it, double-checking their work, and assembling analytic reports.
These agents that work for me are multiplying me significantly. And this is the dumbest they’ll ever be.
This palpable sense of potential work - of having a literal army of hyper-intelligent loyal colleagues at my command - gnaws at me. It’s common now for me to feel like I’m being lazy when I’m with my family. Not because I feel as though I should be working, but rather that I feel guilty that I haven’t tasked some AI system to do work for me while I play with Magna-Tiles with my toddler.
At my company, people are going through the same thing - figuring out how to scale themselves with this, to figure out how to manage a fleet of minds. And to do so before the next AI systems arrive, which will be more capable and more independent still. [...]