A warning from Richard Susskind’s How to Think About AI: A Guide for the Perplexed:

We’re still warming up. In not many years, our current technologies will look primitive, much as our 1980s kit appears antiquated today. [The current wave of AI apps] are our faltering first infant steps. Most predictions about the future are in my view irredeemably flawed because they ignore the not yet invented technologies.

He notes that Ray Kurzweil’s “law of accelerating returns” appears to be coming into play: “Information technologies like computing get exponentially cheaper because each advance makes it easier to design the next stage of their own evolution.”

These are probably the reasons why even top computer scientists, including Stephen Wolfram, cannot explain how generative AI works. Susskind quotes Wolfram: “It’s complicated in there, and we don’t understand it — even though in the end it’s producing recognizable human language.”

The implication? We’re not just on a new road — we may be building a new kind of vehicle while already driving at speed.