It is likely that you have heard from an early age that “seeing is believing.”
As life goes on, it becomes clear that that advice is only partly effective. There are many things in this world that can be true even if we cannot see that they are true. That human beings need air to breathe is just one example of the entire tantalizing set of possibilities out there, though it is a trivial one.
What is not trivial, though, is what I discovered today, which is that AI could very well, in a serious way, end up replacing us, the human race.
It started with my first trial of core work. Now I had an awareness that AI could do something that human beings might want to do, but I’d always thought of myself as being there to prompt things. This is understandable, and it is par for the course when we use ChatGPT or any sort of bot. You still have to write the prompt, and you still have to get everything done.
Today I experienced a sea change as Claude not just wrote things for me but literally did some of the following actions (non-exhaustively):
1. First, it navigated Google Docs, opened up multiple sub-tabs, followed the results of delivering on a prompt which I had created across twelve separate tabs, navigating, screenshotting, and ultimately completing a task of creating a compilation of pieces, ensuring that every single one of them followed the required formatting that I had set out for it.
2. Next, it proceeded to navigate into my WordPress dashboard and then, upon having populated all of the information correctly in the applications Docs connector, proceeded to then copy that all out into a set of pages, titling everything correctly as per my instructions to create 12 separate page posts that followed my instructions, before copying the URLs that I needed as part of a sequence of actions that I could not imagine having taken so quickly.
If it was just that, it would have already been impressive, but this also helped me in another way. It helped me assemble a full DJ set compiling tracks that I would want to play.
Not only that, it even autonomously searched SoundCloud on my behalf before locating links to mixes that were explicitly downloadable. It went through every single one of the gateways on its own by clicking through the whole sea of different actions that SoundCloud creators always want you to take part in. Whether to like their song, follow them on SoundCloud, follow them on Spotify, or any number of other actions necessary to finally get to the end of the wall. Claude did every single one of those things and proceeded to download the tracks to my computer.
Now it might seem that this is very seemingly mundane, but really it explains how I am able to just be out and about right now, completely secure in the awareness that my time is actually being bought back in a very real way that I could never have imagined. Even that was just the beginning.
Truly, seeing is believing, and now I see, and now I believe. What I once imagined as just a mere possibility suddenly and drastically came into reality. Before I knew it, I realized, perhaps a little later than others, that I was living in a new world, filled now with knowledge of that new world that I cannot liberate for myself anymore.
It’s fascinating to see, but frankly, it is also a little terrifying to see it all in action, to genuinely see complex and non-trivial actions get carried out in this way. Where exactly all of this is going is hard to say, but what’s clear to me is that it appears that the universe has showed me something new and unexpected, and it has done so for a reason. It will not behoove me, nor would it be coming of me, to ignore that change and allow things to just be business as usual.
