Patric Dixon, How AI will change your live

book cover

Dixon tells us how he does keynotes everywhere, how he started his own AI company in the 80s as a hobby in addition to studying medicine, how he single-handedly provided a provincial hospital in Africa with medicines, how he sailed around the world with his wife and why he was the first foreigner to have the unimaginable honour of speaking for the Pentagon. Indeed, he is the main protagonist in this book, even though it is officially non-fiction. Or is it?

In thirty chapters, he goes through all relevant market fields and explains how, in his opinion, they will inevitably be influenced by AI and where opportunities and risks lie. In doing so, he liberally sprinkles percentages without any form of source citation. 10% if it is a little, 45% if it is more and sometimes even 75%. All unsubstantiated and unverifiable.

Meanwhile, the AI hype appears to be nothing more than the tech industry’s last desperate attempt to find a way to create some growth now that phones, laptops and all other consumer electronics can do all that they have to and no major innovation on those products is feasable anymore.

“Fundamentally, Large Language Models are not the future. The only reason big tech is investing in this, is that they run out of hyper growth ideas. They don’t have a next iPhone. The don’t have a new Google search. So they’ve put over a trillion dollars with trillions more to come into a kind of a dead-end industry because when that ends, they’ll have to admit that they don’t have anything else.” -- Ed Zitron on CNBC via Vanessa Wingårdh

If you find hardware getting more expensive because data centres gobble up all the RAM chips, in the U.S., energy prices are driven up as well and if this bubble finally bursts, all major investors, including pension funds are going down too.

And a bubble it is. While costing trillions, AI doesn’t have a measurable return on investment. Nowhere does futur(olog)ist Dixon touch on any of this.

The book does not live up to its title. Dixon explains how AI does things faster than humans and can therefore help do things more efficiently, sustainably and simply better. But nowhere is it clear what will cause the titular change in our lives, unless it is this unspecified future self-aware Super Smart AI that he periodically mentions.

And that is my biggest objection to this book. When Dixon talks about this Super Smart AI, he attributes to it the ability to take matters into its own hands, perhaps out of self-protection. Dixon doesn’t seem to understand that any AI, no matter how well-trained, is in essence without any intention, and principally nothing more than the word predictor that now and then gets in my way when writing this piece on my phone.

A book written by a someone calling himself a futurist is by definition fiction. Dixon makes statements without acknowledging sources, not unlike most AI interfaces.