Thanks for bringing this up. I’ve also been wanting to vent a little somewhere, and maybe this community isn’t a bad place to do it. To be frank, it worries me to see the increasingly prominent role that AI is playing in our lives. And this is particularly true in the realm of large corporations, though not exclusively. Even the average person (at least the younger ones) is replacing all other sources of information with the quick, pre-packaged answers that an LLM can provide. Worse still, more and more people are using these tools as consultants, asking them for advice on emotional, financial, and work-related matters, among others.
Anyway, to be specific, my biggest concern (though not the only one) is that we’re forgetting that the human brain works just like any other muscle—you have to exercise it every day, because if you don’t, it will atrophy over time. I can’t help but think that the compulsive, abusive, and irresponsible use of AI is slowly leading us toward a future similar to the one depicted in the first 15 minutes of the movie Idiocracy.
I once heard someone say that good times create weak men and hard times create strong men. There’s no need to take such an extreme view, but I do believe that the comfort of having someone (or something) else take care of everything for us will, in the medium and long term, come at an enormous cost—both on a personal level and for humanity as a whole.
I don’t mean to sound paranoid, much less like a conspiracy theorist, but there seems to be a purpose behind this sudden and pervasive surge in AI that we’ve seen over the past 5 or 6 years. Maybe it’s just ambition, and they’re simply dreaming of making us so dependent on these tools that we can no longer live without them… or maybe it’s something even more sinister… who knows.
Well, anyway, I’m getting old and becoming more and more of a complainer.
Let me add one more thing: I’ve been working as a software engineer for many years, but I still retain my fascination with programming, solving problems, and coming up with lighter, more efficient ways to do something that’s already been solved before. Even for me, it’s fun to “reinvent the wheel”—to do something my own way (not necessarily better, but more to my liking) that someone else did a long time ago. I don’t know if anyone else enjoys programming as much as I do, but I feel like AI is taking even that away from us—the joy of doing something on our own. Now it’s mostly all about productivity, speed, and even posturing, since for many people it seems more important to create the illusion that they’re indispensable cogs in the “machinery” than to be objectively useful.
Anyway, I just wanted to vent a little; I’m sorry if I strayed a bit from the focus of this post.
