No You Can't Prompt Your Way To Abundance

AI doesn’t magically give you purpose and direction.

AI doesn’t magically give you purpose and direction. It’s no different to a wannabe author staring at a blank Word doc believing that a blockbuster novel is about to unfold instantly.

I’ve seen people use OpenAI to create a videogame like Beat Saber but unless you have knowledge of shaders and how to ask for particular code you won’t get the results you expected. It doesn’t miraculously make you an expert. The person who wanted to prompt his way to a business empire with ChatGPT failed miserably too. AI is not going to act as your Product Manager or CFO if you have no idea what those roles do and how to get the best out of them.

This goes for education and thinking AI can take over the classroom, or it’s a personal learning assistant. We’ve quite literally lived with the world’s knowledge at our fingertips for decades through the web yet we still squander it, make it inaccessible to many and misinform with it.

If you give each and every person a million dollars some will still go to the bookies and spend it on the horses. AI is the same, the power and knowledge to potentially change your life but only you know what you want out of it. In the end, AI is still a point solution, and that’s not a bad thing but we need to stop inflating it to be something else.

Influencers and newsletter experts tend to ignore this, claiming AI (generative and others) can give you tailored learning or business powers by prompting them into existence. You still need to know what to ask otherwise it’s back to the same “tell me a dirty joke” request we all tried with Alexa.

This rhetoric that AI will usher in an “age of abundance” for everyone is really tiresome and popular amongst the (b)influencer set. Can you record yourself and then play it back to hear how silly it sounds?

We are a species of infinite capacity to consume living on a planet of finite resources to satiate those desires. AI doesn’t magically create the unlimited from thin air and won’t just prompt it into existence either. We have a cultural attachment to the idea of abundance in the same way a swarm of locusts do, it’s like some sort of ‘Get Out of Jail Free Card’ — abundance will excuse us of our voracious needs. It won’t. In fact, it will always promote looking upwards at what someone else has more of rather than looking down to see what we’ve accomplished because even with no limits we will always as a society want more than the next person.

We need to get a bit more realistic, to start thinking about the challenges that AI can help us solve that move society away from believing that the planet can sustain us forever the way we’ve been treating it for centuries. There is no silver bullet any technology can deliver for our insatiable appetites and we certainly cannot maintain these levels of hubris for much longer.

No amount of AI can do that. The sooner we think differently the better.

Now, go open that Word doc and write a novel.