arys

all the previous examples of technology improving has a greater benefit to offset the detriment.

Books, for example, did decrease our skill to just retain information; however, the benefit of sharing, storing, and propagating information long after you’re gone has proven WAY more useful.

a GPS might have decreased your skill in navigation (although reading abstractised maps of where you are is a trade-off), but it allowed for improvements in travel, a harder time getting lost, enabling rescue operations etc.

genAI so far does have it’s uses in fields like medicine, chemistry, any domain where generating by hand is unfeasible. But for the general population, it has been proven to impact cognitive skills, it eroded trust across the board:

• you have to second guess if someone online is a LLM or a person
• you have to scrutinise whether or not an art piece is made with or without AI
• news and media have become so much easier to impact
• not to mention, all the climate impact the rapid constructions of data centres does (yes, data centres have existed and have been built before, but not to this pace or scale)
• and maybe the increasing cases of AI psychosis, with all the varieties of harm people have experienced due to this. etc.

For all of this to be offset, there’d need to be a phenomenal benefit to come out of genAI the way it’s used today. I don’t think the advent of books, libraries, calculators and GPS have had a combined net loss for everyone, more than AI has.

And for the record, I do believe AI is an useful technology. But that remaining usefulness will only show itself from the shockwave, after the bubble bursts.

the same people that invented fireworks (thing that is set on fire and goes boom) now actively research/made the safe batteries (things that DON’T set on fire AND don’t go boom)