Why Smart People Can’t Agree on Whether AI Is a Revolution or a Toy

Hey there, I’m Alberto! 👋 Each week, I publish long-form AI analysis covering technology, culture, philosophy, and business for The Algorithmic Bridge.

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This is your weekly paid guide. I had a different one prepared, but this is more important right now (timely). Enjoy. I genuinely enjoyed writing this post.

I’ve been thinking about why the AI debate is so broken—why some people are convinced that AI is the next revolution, whereas others consider it a fun toy at best—despite everyone involved being so damn smart. I refuse to accept the easy way out of assuming the other side is full of idiots. And although there are hidden motivations and whatnot on both sides, that’s not the case for a friend telling a friend that AI is cool. So, yes, dishonesty is not absent but also not rampant.

What follows are my notes on this question (I’ve found that a conversational register works well to convey ideas I haven’t fully polished yet, and you seem to like it). My goal is to give you a “framework” for the next time someone tells you that AI is the greatest thing since we invented fire, or that it’s mostly fake (I won’t make judgment calls; those who read me know that my position is nuanced).

Let me state the thesis here and then work my way through it: both groups of people—enthusiasts and skeptics (or whatever you want to call them, no label feels right)—are telling their truth. That’s the whole story, really, as I see it: we share the forum where we debate our lives (social media, etc.), but the lives being debated are hardly shared.

This gap between ones and others is widening extremely fast, and although I’ve been writing about this since ChatGPT at least, I think it has lately become the most urgent societal matter regarding AI. My job is, literally, to do my best to try to close this gap. Not for nothing does my newsletter contain the word “bridge”: The world is built on bridges, and undone by gaps.

You may think it's impossible to bridge the gap at this point, but I refuse to admit defeat. Like every other conflict in life, this is ...