I think most people imagine AI as something that can learn for you, so that you don’t have to go through the painful tasks of reading and Tinkering and communicating with others about what’s going on.

I disagree. I think the AI Revolution would truly commence if we manage to refuel an educational revolution, where we empower children to find new uses for the tools we built. Which would mean a lot more tinkering, reading and actually communicating about what’s going on.

But I don’t think we’ll be more comfortable. Disruption is unpleasant before it becomes beatiful.

Right now, we had a few bad years in the infancy of our digital civilization. Basically what we managed so far was connecting a lot of people only when it was profitable, bringing back underpaid labor with the gig economy, giving tyrannts the digital tools to shoot down democracies without firing one bullet and of course, letting kids glue their faces to tablets while performing menial, repetitive tasks, without any curiosity or opportunity to learn about the technology involved.

But I’m optimistic that we’ll recover. Frictionless payments. Digitized services, including in the public sector. Reinforcing feedback loops between industry and education. Automation that brings together more than it targets and divides. Let’s bridge the gaps of inequality by planning for long-term growth, not for avoiding a few bad quarters along the way.

And let’s just make sure we’re stepping in the right direction.