AI as a welding arc
Stray voltage is disastrous.
The temperature of welding arc can be up to 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit (5,500 degrees Celsius).
That's pretty hot.
In general, welding is about directing high heat (usually via an electrical current) to fuse materials together. With welding, we can make everything from aircraft carriers, to fermentation vats for craft beer, to car chassis, to the Alaska pipeline, and everything in between.
High energy and high heat. Focused for a purpose.
But when high energy and high heat is unfocused, it leads to disastrous results:
House fires. Forest fires. Thousands of decimated acres.
I like to think of wise use of AI as a proper application of energy and heat. Every prompt is consuming a tremendous amount of energy. The tool at my disposal has great potential for good—and also for evil.
Unfocused use of AI yields AI slop and thousands of other abominable outputs. The unrestrained fire that's straining our social relationships and obliterating whatever trust we had in media is plain to everyone who spends any time online.
Focused use of AI helps us to drive business value, learn new things more quickly, wrangle massive datasets, and solve real problems. I leverage AI like this on pretty much a daily basis in my work, and it's amazing what you can accomplish with just a few targeted prompts and some technical know how. I find it exhilarating.
Welding is always done for a structural purpose, and we can see how that one skill—that precise application of energy—has effectively transformed the modern world.
We're past the AI inflection point. Now we must ask: Will we build with it, or destroy?
