I am going to give a bit of a contrarian counterpoint here and invite everybody to think what we stand to loose with these AI tools.
It is disingenuous to think that innovations come with only benefits, that every piece of tech is a net addition to out lives. My grandma is better at mental arithmetic than myself because she dealt with cash change her whole life. We have lost our orienting skills since the mass adoption of google maps. College students have middle-school level grammar skills due to the ubiquitous use of tools like Grammarly.
We are weaker and fatter since most of us don’t do any real physical labor and we eat mass-produced artificially enhanced food. The list is long.
Now AI, that’s scary. Do I want to outsource my intelligence?
One of my PhD advisor once told me that writing (the paper) is where the real understanding happens (and I came to agree with him). Organizing is understanding.
If writing, organizing, linking, resurfacing is done by the AI, which skills in my brain are anthropizing and do I really want that?
I am not against AI, (how could I be? it’s my job!), but I do not embrace it. We should think of the second order effects of these technologies.
I am afraid we may end up with a small fraction of the population net smarter, the people who successfully use these tools as a “cognitive lever”, and large fraction of population net dumber, people who need the AI tools as a “cognitive crutch” otherwise they would not function.
It is a know story at this point that Silicon Valley parents don’t let their children use social media. Will 5-10 years from now, read the same thing about AI assistants?