I thought this statement was a bit ridiculous, so I thought I would ask an actual AI to opine on it…
It seems like a reasonable response…so I’m not sure if that actually makes you right or wrong. 
And a pulley is only a wheel. There is a tremendous difference between computers in a glass room and computers that go into your phone, your, drier, your refrigerator, your glasses. AI is already changing the way we interact with them. No one (well, hardly anyone) had an emotional attraction to a mainframe. It seems lots of people have emotional attractions to chatbots.
And think of when the computers migrate inside of us, so they are our constant companions. They may still be computers, but nothing like the ones even today.
The impact of the invention is what we don’t see yet. I think it was Heinlein who wrote that plenty of writers predicted cars, but no one predicted the drive-in movie and the change in dating habits the car inspired.
People develop emotional attachments to all sorts of inanimate objects (cars, bikes, their phone, etc). And the notion of developing an emotional connection to a robot or AI is not unprecedented. I can think of any number of examples or robotic or AI characters from film, television, and books that are beloved by both audiences and in-story characters.
Like I’m trying to imagine the in-story conversation that ends with John Connor saying "Agreed, terminators are highly dangerous killing machines that can’t be bargained with, can’t be reasoned with, doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear, and absolutely will not stop ever, until you we are all dead. We should probably destroy this thing as soon as possible.
Or…and now hear me out…how AWESOME would it be to reprogram it to be my best friend and send it back in time to when I was a kid!"
I think people do have trouble imagining a world significantly different from what they grew up with. Look at the invention of the videocamera. I don’t think anyone ever dreamed that we would produce a society where every human had like on average at least half a dozen cameras and people would make vast fortunes recording stupid nonsense.
I do think that regardless of what AI produces, people will figure out a way to jockey for status and privilege. I guess I sort of wonder what such a society might look like where achieving status thought being able to conquer others with your sword or your mental superiority becomes obsolete.
People will be generally less well informed, including many of the people on whom we rely on for expertise, like scientists. I won’t remember the name of the mathematician who described the following impact of AI on science and research but he made the following argument:
The process of “manually” solving a problem by going through the various steps, tedious though it may be, offers a person insight into the method, patterns, and middle-term results. It provides a better feel for when things may be going in the wrong direction and whether the answer is more likely correct or incorrect. It provides better intuition when evaluating the answer/result and drawing a conclusion.
When the steps to a solution are obscured by the AI black box, determining whether the answer is correct becomes much more difficult to judge.
IOW: On the whole, we’ll be dumber for it.
Wasn’t there a Pixar animated film with fat humans travelling through space with the average IQ of a carp?
True, but this sounds like saying that handheld calculators, Excel, computers, etc. made humans much worse at arithmetic. Sure, but it was the price to pay for a much more efficient convenience. We may be much less skilled at multiple ten-digit numbers on paper now than before, but 99.99999% of the time, we don’t need to.
AI is exploding in medicine to the point where no doctor, no matter how committed, can keep up with all the new answers.
So they created a searchable website (OPEN AI) that has the goal of adding every single new discovery into the database that is free for medical professionals to use.
And I think that this ties in with the AI replacing teachers scenario, in that for any knowledge based careers, AI can step in and do a better job.
I assume you are referring to Wall-E.
Here’s an interesting question. If they were to make a sequel to Wall-E, who do you think people would turn out to watch - the cute robot couple or the fat stupid human colonists?
Yes. We live in a golden age of information while wisdom seems to be dying on the vine, and I believe you hit the nail on the head as to why.
You need both to provide that contrast/tension. Smart humans made AI robots. Humans got stupid, fat and lazy as a result. Robots continue to serve humanity because they have become more human than humans (but only in the best way). Oh look, cute robots!
If we can solve all the problems it seems to create with conceptual understanding and critical thinking, I think AI might one day be able to support education. But the example you gave requires trained medical staff to identify stuff in the database and then use their judgement about what to apply or not apply. It also assumes that all these discoveries are accurate, but I can’t imagine there has been enough time to test these ideas in the field. A lot of conceptually sound ideas meet a lot of challenges in practice.
One of the things that I think makes this argument so hard for people to understand is that most of us have already been taught how to think. I can choose to engage with AI in ways that enhance my understanding (though I’ve also done it in ways that affected my own competence), I know what critical thinking is because I have done it all my life, and learning to do it required a lot of hard cognitive tasks, messy experimentation, and experience being wrong. It allows us the judgment to say, “You know what? The way I’m using this tool is not a good idea. I’m going to need to change my approach.”
If subsequent generations are never taught how to do that, and never have to go through that messy process, they won’t even know what they don’t know.
I don’t know if you have a school-aged kid but they are handing out tablets in kindergarten now. There is limited evidence this enhances learning and we can see that educational outcomes in the US have tanked and are continuing to tank. My thought is we should be looking at whether the technological wonders of an iPad, while significantly more convenient, may be contributing to tanking student performance. I suspect there’s something special about interactive discourse with another human being that facilitates learning.
It’s not just school-aged kids, either. People even before AI became publicly accessible have been complaining they can’t sit down and read a book any more, and studies show that when people read information online they are less likely to make connections with other material or really process what they have found in a cohesive way. Eye tracking studies also show that people aren’t really reading in the conventional sense - they are scanning for the information they want and not contextualizing it at all.
I have caught myself doing this.
So this is already a problem.
Therefore, I’m going to need to see a substantial, longitudinal body of research before I am convinced there is a place in education for AI.
I can’t remember who said this, but we are engaging people in the most massive sociological experiment that has ever been conducted, with no controls, informed consent, accountability structure, or safety guardrails. We have no idea what the future will look like, yet we’ve rushed it out to the masses without any data on its effects.
If AI is as revolutionary as it is claimed to be, that is crazy.
Nearly everyone talks to their car, their TV, the Millennium Falcon. But they don’t talk back, and no one (well hardly anyone) has long conversations with them.
Plus, never mind the Queen song, few people have love affairs with the possessions.
People worry about the birth rate dropping. People spending their fertile years in a relationship with a chatbot instead of a person is not going to help things any.
People have been self-selecting themselves out of the genepool since the pool was filled with genes.
See priests and nuns. But mostly people didn’t have so much help.
I suppose the main thing I wonder is will AI and automation free humans to spend more time doing stuff they enjoy with other humans?
Or will it isolate us by creating a world where most of us spend our time alone streaming media and having most of our needs attended to without requiring much human interaction?
Hmmm. A quick google shows that divorce rates are going up only for people 65 and older, which implies that retirement might lead to a higher divorce rate. I can see it - some couples who barely saw each other when they worked might not find more togetherness conducive. (We did find.) So perhaps AI leading to more time with ones partner will lead to more divorces.
I thought the paradise was everyone being creative. But even today people are chugging out more books than anyone has the time to read. I suspect most of them are awful.
I wonder if we could revise Sturgeon’s Law for AI generated work. Not 90%, more like 99.9% of everything is crap.
As far as the school kids go, digital devices are unfortunately here to stay. And i’ve no doubt that the student performance will continue to suffer, because the kids don’t need to do it the disciplined way like we did.
The old days of studying because you have to in order to get passing grades is gone gone gone. Now we’re looking at a carnival pinwheel, and it’s literally a case of where it stops nobody knows.
I can only hope that smarter minds than I, can figure out a way of making it all very engaging for students to dig deep into. Maybe AI will come up with a plan?
From what I Googled, marriage has been in overall decline for decades. Reading too for the general adult population, however reading physical books is up for Gen Z.
Nope
Yep
This kind of describes life for many, already.
The issue is that research keeps turning up the importance of social relationships for overall well-being. One subtle impact of AI I’ve been thinking about is how when you have a problem, traditionally you’d reach out to someone more experienced to ask them what they recommend. It’s a kind of social connection to have a problem you can’t solve. With AI, this goes away. It may seem small but when you have a bunch of similar tradeoffs you risk some very big impacts on social cohesion.
I was talking divorce. Marriage is a different issue.
As for books:
More than 4.2 million books with ISBN numbers were published in the United States in 2025, according to data compiled by Bowker via Publishers Weekly. This total marks a 32.5% increase over 2024.
It’s not a matter of people reading more or less. It is the number of books dumped on the market. It was high already with the rise of self-publishing, but everything I’ve read attributes the gigantic increase last year to AI.
Most of these are ebooks, not physical books, of course. I guess some are print on demand, but I don’t know how many.