Tom Scott on AI in February 2023
From the video:
I've been complaining for years that it feels like nothing has really changed since smartphones came along. And I think that maybe, maybe I should have been careful what I wished for.
It's been 2 years since Tom Scott stopped posting weekly videos on YouTube, but he was still doing it when ChatGPT came out, and this video from February 2023, just 2 months after ChatGPT launched, came up in my feed again today. Given how fresh LLMs were to the public at that time, I think it's actually really impressive how well this video essay holds up 3 years later. Scott comes at the topic with the right amount of humility, clearly expressing the fact no one knew how far along the curve we were in terms of capability. He also spends a good amount of time discussing how he lived through the last couple technical revolutions, he navigated them well, and he'd become comfortable in the current state of the world.
What I find really notable about his feelings are that he did a little coding project in the ChatGPT chat interface, and that is what pushed him over the edge into going "wow, this is already massively disruptive." For some context, he would have been using GPT-3.5 when this video came out. In retrospect, that's an absolute shit model that no one in 2026 would trust to find typos in their writing, let along being their coding agent. But even then, Tom was like, "uh oh, that's already as good as me."
The pull quote I chose for the video expresses something I can't stop thinking about either, which is this seeming desire for tech to get better, to change, and to be interesting, but also for that to happen without changing anything at all. Anything that makes people more productive or could lead to the slightest bit of disruption is seen as bad.
It's impossible not to think about this quote from Douglas Adams:
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
And yes, they did say "this time it's different" every single time.