How the World Got Wired · Epilogue — One Last Thing

The Boring, Useful Part

Most of what you will hear about artificial intelligence, in the years ahead, will fall into one of two stories. Either it will be doomsaying — predictions of mass unemployment, of social collapse, of existential risk. Or it will be hype — predictions of utopia, of solving every problem, of a glorious automated future. Both stories will be exaggerated. Both will miss the part you should care about most.

The part you should care about most is the texture of ordinary life.

Here are some things that, by the time you read this book, are already happening.

A kid in a small town with no good math teacher can, on her phone, for free, get tutored on any topic at her exact level, on her own schedule, by a system that does not get tired, does not lose patience, does not have favorites. This is not a perfect substitute for a real teacher. Real teachers do things AI cannot do. But for a child whose local school has no music teacher at all, or whose science teacher has not opened a textbook since 1995, having a patient, knowledgeable companion available all day is — frankly — life-changing.

A doctor in a rural hospital, hundreds of miles from the nearest specialist, can in some cases now get a second opinion from a system that has read more medical research than any human alive. Some kinds of medical errors — missed diagnoses, overlooked drug interactions, misread scans — are being caught now that would have killed people, quietly, five years ago.

A scientist trying to understand how proteins fold — the basic shapes that determine whether a drug will work, the mysteries that used to consume entire careers — can now, in many cases, predict the structure of a protein in minutes, using systems built by the same researchers who built the chatbots. Diseases that would have taken twenty years to find treatments for are starting to be addressed in two.

A person who has lost the ability to speak, because of stroke or injury, can in some cases now talk through a machine that reads their brain activity and produces speech. A person who is blind can wear glasses that describe the world to them in real time. A person who is deaf can have a live conversation translated to text on their phone, in dozens of languages.

A small business in a country your great-grandparents had never heard of can, with help from translation and AI-generated marketing, sell to customers around the world that it never would have reached.

A grandmother in Vietnam — to bring this whole book back to where it started — can ask an AI assistant in her own language for advice about her health, her travel, her finances, her grandchildren. She can get answers that are surprisingly good. Twenty years ago, she would have needed to speak English, or to know a specialist, or to pay one. Now she just asks.

None of these is a small thing. Each of them — the kid with no teacher, the doctor in the rural hospital, the scientist studying disease, the person with disability, the small business, the grandmother — is a quiet, real, life-improving change. None of them get the press coverage that the dramatic warnings get. Added together, though, they are vast. My best guess — and it is a guess — is that each year, more lives are made better by the boring, useful uses of this technology than will be ruined by the dramatic, scary ones.

I want you to hold that possibility in your mind, alongside the warnings in the last few chapters. Both are real. Neither cancels the other out.

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