The Pre-Generative AI Era

Society has been irreversibly changed, but we might want to collectively slow down to preserve essential aspects of what we have known as human existence | Edition #256

Aurochs, horses, and deer. Lascaux cave paintings, dated to about 17,000 to 22,000 years ago (modified)

Generative AI has changed how people consume and produce knowledge, as well as how people think about learning and the process of building skills.

These are massive changes, probably much more significant and comprehensive than most people think.

Also, because these changes directly affect the social fabric and society's knowledge production layers, they are irreversible, and the pre-generative AI era is likely gone forever.

Today, I want to talk about the era that has just ended and what we might have lost. Although there is no coming back, we might want to collectively slow down to preserve some of the essential aspects of what we have known as human existence.

From books to social media posts, from songs to movies, from research papers to consulting reports, from homework to legal briefs, from memes to visual art, no medium or field has escaped the generative AI wave, which over the past three years has reshaped culture, education, work, and every single professional industry.

As AI chatbots are usually accessed online, the internet became the natural environment for the wave to grow, spread, and attract hundreds of millions of people worldwide.

While the emergence of the commercial internet caused a seismic change in the information economy, creating a new layer, effectively a new dimension, where information, goods, and human interactions could be presented, exchanged, and transacted, generative AI caused a different type of change.

It was built on top of the two previous tech waves, the internet and social media, but it has created a more poignant and radical type of change: an epistemic one.

It changed how people can produce and consume content, information, knowledge, and ideas. Suddenly, with a few short prompts, every possible type of content could be created, analyzed, summarized, explained, compared, modified, edited, repurposed, improved, and transformed indefinitely.

Those were actions that, before the generative AI wave, most of the time would require a human, often someone with previous training or practical expertise. Now, people just need to prompt an AI chatbot. For free.

This extreme convenience, or the sudden availability of a synthetic version of every form of human-made creative or intellectual expression, has led to a fundamental change in people’s beliefs about knowledge, learning, and, ultimately, what it means to be human.

These changes are much more significant than they seem, and although we will only see their long-term consequences in 15 to 20 years, they are probably as disruptive and destabilizing as the arrival of hypothetical forms of superintelligence.

In many ways, this could be the most profound shift in what it means to be human that we have ever faced, and the implications are only starting to unfold: