The Coming Crisis of Purpose

Article originally published on LinkedIn.

Yesterday, 2022 ended, a year marked by the beginning of the massive dissemination of AI with the arrival of Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, and DALLE-2 for image generation, but especially by the launch of ChatGPT, which revolutionized the world in just a few days.

But 2023 - not to mention 2024 - is going to multiply this many times over. By how much? It’s very difficult to know in advance. Exponential growth is tremendously complex to imagine. We know that GPT-4 will arrive (some are already testing it) and that its creators claim it will change everything.

Much closer to home, the end of 2022 was a catalyst for GoKoan: we went from being an education startup that had set up a local online exam preparation academy with a great deal of effort, to transforming ourselves into Koanly, one of the first Spanish generative AI startups applied to education, with a global reach from minute zero. Brutal. In just three months. Yes, we will still need two or three more to launch everything to the market, but we are already on the AI scene and we know we have a great product on our hands.

In other words, we can say firsthand that this is going fast, very fast. So much so that it is difficult to assimilate, especially for those of us who move on the frontier, observing how the pieces of the puzzle are being completed and what was previously impossible is now not only possible, but takes half an hour to do.

And where does all this lead us? Well, to an inevitable situation: whether we reach AGI or not - which IMHO we will, and I think in the next 5 years - AI is going to change everything, and in many cases, in one fell swoop. And this is where the problem lies. People who go from having a more or less clear future to, suddenly, without seeing it coming, seeing how they become irrelevant. Those “skills” that made them unique and so valuable are, overnight, replicated and even surpassed by AI. “And now, what do I do?”

It is already happening in the art world, with artists in a full-blown war against AI, many asking for their works to be excluded from the training data of new models to prevent (it’s like putting up fences in the countryside) AI from replicating their work.

With Co-pilot writing 80% of the code of elite programmers, the world of programming is already seeing its foundations tremble.

But this is going to touch all fields. And it is inevitable.

My wife asks me “if I’m okay”. “Yes,” I answer. And it’s true. For the moment it doesn’t affect me, and many may not understand that I am an active part of this transformation process. But I believe that being a part of it is the best way to be able to have an opinion, and above all, to be able to shape where all this leads. I am not going to be a spectator, I am going to be an active part of this inevitable revolution.

And that is why, at the same time that I am re-imagining what education will be like in the coming years and helping to shape it, I want to start a long-term project on one of the greatest challenges facing humanity in the coming years.

There is a lot of talk about the problem of AI alignment - ensuring that AI follows guidelines favorable to humanity, even when they are not explicit - but for me there is a second, equally critical problem: solving the problem of human purpose after the advent of AI. “And what are we going to do now?”

Basic income, very good. I have enough to live on. Abundance. Very good. “But what do I do with my life now?” That is the drama. And this is a problem I want to work on in parallel with my work. From a place of calm. From the illusion that has always moved my life, which will be a source of inspiration to find the keys to solving this tremendous challenge. And you, do you already know how to solve it?