I have been recently challenged by many on the question on what happens to all of us with the advent of universal AI.

The answer to this question for a while was this was too hard and too big a question to really answer properly.

How could anyone even ponder and think about the first order, the second order and the third order effects of such a big change brought on by LLMs and their human like ability to think and reason and their access to almost an infinite supply of information.

So I did what almost everyone generally does when faced with such questions.

I ignored it.

However, recently a friend asked “Is everyone going to be smarter with AI?”

This forced me to think about one aspect of the change that is coming.

Is everyone going to be smarter now?

Let’s walk through this…

We started with no stored information, till we had books and libraries. And people who could study these books and had access to them had enormous influence and power.

Then we had the printing press, radios, tvs, mobile phones and the internet.

Suddenly information was not limited, it was unlimited. You could at the flick of a wrist pull up information on anything you could wish. You could choose to become an expert on any subject you wanted. You could become a doctor, a lawyer and an engineer.

The key answer we found out is that while one could do all that. The vast majority did not. They suddenly didn’t overcome their irrationality, their biases, their thought processes, their lack of motivation or values.

A deeply human flawed world suddenly in the span of 25 years with the availability of the internet didn’t become less human. In fact, it became more divided.

We all had more information, but less truth.

The internet didn’t tear down walls we had been building all through history. It made them rise up sharper.

Then we have AI

The internet democratized access to information.
AI democratized access to cognition.

But humans are still humans.

The people using AI are still people and have the same human biases and more. Using AI just amplifies Humanity’s strengths and weakness.

cognition + irrationationalism = still irrational

After 25 years of the internet, there is a lot of views of cat videos and a lot less degrees.

What matters less is what AI provides to people (the ability to think and reason), what matters more is whether People choose to use it.

Being Human is always about the choices one makes and that is not changing one bit because of AI.
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This was made by a Human.
This is a part 1 of series of posts around thinking about the future of AI.