Being AI-Native: It’s Easier Said Than Done

Pretty soon, many of us are going to have little to no reference for what things were like before LLMs could talk to you, generate pictures and stories and other art forms, act like therapists, blow through Turing tests, and doing just all of what they’ve been doing to creep us out over the last five years. The uncanny valley, the last little tells of non-human creative origin, will vanish. We will be living side by side with another species, one that has not been evolved in the biological way, but rather, engineered in silicon.

The philosophical ramifications are intense. We deal with this every day in the MIT community, as our best and brightest work on the problems of the day. I work on it, as an event organizer, a partner at Link Ventures, and in collaboration with colleagues like Daniela Rus and Ramesh Raskar, putting together responses, as it were, to the breakneck pace of technological change.

But my other point was: soon, a new generation will have grown up with all of this. And that really makes a difference.

Those of us who are not “AI-native,” in that sense, will have an uphill battle to fight. Those of us old enough to have seen the origin of the Internet, the personal computer, digital color, and cloud computing, all of them big changes in themselves, thought we were presiding over the great era of change. We weren’t even close, because what Back to the Future and other imaginings failed to prepare us for was intelligence out of computing, ex nihilo in a formidable sense, that, as Bill Gates says, was put together in a lab, and developed further on its own.

Business Tomorrow

It seems evident to me that in the years to come, all of us, even us older people, will need to learn to become AI-native. What does that mean?

Both of these experts talked about how they use agents.

With that in hand, we got into the meaning of AI-native.

She gave this further defining thought:

He had this to say about the human role:

A timely question, to be sure.