I recently took the AIARE 1 course and learned a few things about avalanches. The tools for navigation interest me the most.
A map tells you where you are. You can have the perfect map that includes every single detail of your surroundings, but you will still be lost if you forget to bring a compass.
At your job, you will encounter many maps. Your job title and description is a map. Your performance review is also a map. You will find many career guides and roadmaps that are essentially maps. In your life, you will hear people tell you to do this, avoid that, follow these steps, and repeat someone else's success. Recall the days when you were in school; your syllabus was a map. Your degree was a map. Every course you took came with a map. Despite having so many maps at your disposal, one of the most frequent questions I hear from you is, "What should I do next?"
You are lost. You should have brought a compass.
The compass represents your guiding principles. It is the values, beliefs, and priorities that shape your decisions and actions. It is independent of the situation you are in and the maps you have (or don't have). It helps you make progress towards the right direction, especially when you are in unfamiliar territory.
To acquire a map, you just need to look around, and chances are someone has already charted the world for you. But a compass can only be found within you. You must learn from first-hand experience. Try things out to develop your own taste. Get lost so you know how to find your way back. Make things and break things to understand what hurts you and what makes you happy. Only then will you start to feel the different weights of things in your life.
I learned in my avalanche course that following other people's tracks can lead you to dangerous terrain. Sadly, people often mistake someone else's path on a map for their own bearing. This might work for a while, but as soon as the world starts to change, you will be carried away by the avalanche of hype and trends, and end up in worse places.
I believe having a compass is key to living a fulfilled life. Knowing the reason behind each decision will absolve you from regret when circumstances prevent you from reaching your goals. And that reason must come from within you, not from other people and the maps they have drawn. That reason even precedes the meaning of your life.
I am condemned to be free; there is no escape from this freedom. I am responsible for my actions, and I cannot blame others for my choices. - Jean-Paul Sartre
But will the AI systems in the near future be our ultimate escape from the freedom to act? When AI acts on our behalf without us making any decisions, do we still bear the consequences of our proxied actions? If not, what will be left as the weight of our existence?
I'm less worried about job displacement and more about a meaning crisis – people living lives by following the optimal decisions as determined by AI. If our decision-making processes are the same, (i.e., they are based on the same foundational models trained with the same reward functions, and executed under the same ethical calculus), then what differentiates you and me? Will we live the unsurprising lives of machines, or will the machines live the surprising lives of humans?