Readit NewsIs that where we're going with this? The user has to choose between fast and dumb or slow and right?
This is post hoc ergo propter hoc. AI exists thus it must have been inevitable.
You have no proof it was inevitable.
(Also AI means something wildly different than it meant a few years ago - I remember when AI meant AGI, the salesmen have persuaded you the emperor has clothes because they solved a single compelling test).
You are comparing a cheap subscription service to an expensive piece of hardware that would replace hardware that most people already owned
Of course smartphones were slower to adopt. Everyone had phones already, and they were expensive!
ChatGPT is *free
Not sure if these are the best stats to illustrate the point, but ChatGPT was released November 2022, 2.5 years ago, and they currently claim ~1 billion users [1]
By comparison, iPhone sales were something like 30 million over the same time period, June 2007 through 2009. [2]
In other words, what took ChatGPT several months took smartphones several years.
Of course there are problems with the comparison (iPhones are expensive, but many people bought each version of the iPhone making the raw user count go down, Sam Altman is exaggerating, people use LLMs other than ChatGPT, blah blah blah), so maybe let's not concentrate on this particular analogy. The point is: even a very skeptical view of how many people use LLMs day-to-day has to acknowledge they are relatively popular, for better or worse.
I think we're better served trying to keep the cat from scratching us rather than trying to put it back in the bag. Ham-fisted megalomaniac CEOs forcing a dangerous technology on workers before we all understand the danger is a big problem, that's for sure. To the original point, "AI-first is the new RTO", there's definitely some juice there, but it's not because the general public is anti-AI.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/martineparis/2025/04/12/chatgpt...
[2] https://www.globaldata.com/data-insights/technology--media-a...
> did your boss ever have to send you a memo demanding that you use a smartphone
Yes, there were tons of jobs that required you to have a smartphone, and still do. I remember my second job, they'd give out Blackberries - debatably not smartphones, but still - to the managers and require work communication on them. I know this was true for many companies.
This isn't the perfect analogy anyway, since one major reason companies did this was to increase security, while forcing AI onto begrudging workers feels like it could have the opposite effect. The commonality is efficiency, or at least the perception of it by upper management.
One example I can think of where there was worker pushback but it makes total sense is the use of electronic medical records. Doctors/nurses originally didn't want to, and there are certainly a lot of problems with the tech, but I don't think anyone is suggesting now that we should go back to paper.
You can make the argument that an "AI first" mandate will backfire, but the notion that workers will collectively gravitate towards new tech is not true in general.
What’s weird was you couldn’t even prompt around it. I tried things like
”Don’t compliment me or my questions at all. After every response you make in this conversation, evaluate whether or not your response has violated this directive.”
It would then keep complementing me and note how it made a mistake for doing so.
They don’t get updated with the latest emotional hot button issues so they just can’t stomp on emotional triggers as well. It’s much easier to digest arguments and see the errors when you can reread them. They don’t take long to read so they don’t clog up access to other sources.
Rebuttals are targeting a specific argument so you can’t just keep throwing up intellectual chaff.
I read Atlas Shrugged as an impressionable young teen, and developed some pretty horrible notions about society and morality (and literary technique) as a result. Of course I saw the error of my ways, in no small part by reading other books!
Don't get me wrong, books-as-propaganda isn't necessarily bad. Animal Farm, 1984, To Kill a Mockingbird... These are brilliant but are also such effective forms of propaganda that even mentioning their titles is a form of propaganda in itself.
So in the public consciousness it's like (NFTs, meme coins, metaverse, AI)
When I think it's more like (internet, smartphones, AI)
We'll see who's right in a few years I guess. But I'll +1 your view that plenty of people put AI in the first group, I know a few myself.
Failure to do the homework made class time useless, the material was difficult, and the instructors were willing to give out failing grades. So doing the homework was vital even when it wasn't graded. Perhaps that can also work well here in the context of AI, at least for some subjects.
Should we let the kids who cheat using AI drop by the wayside, never learning a thing for themselves? Or should we do the same for kids who, for whatever reason, just will not do school work outside a classroom? Maybe it works really well for some subjects and not others? Or only for some age ranges? What about the students like you, and there are probably a lot of them, where it would be unfair to judge their abilities at specific times in specific settings?
I guess the reason I bring it up now is that AI has tipped it over the edge, where cheating is now so easy and effective that it is starting to tempt kids who would not otherwise cheat.
The genie says "you can flick this wand at anything in the universe and - for 30 seconds - you will swap places with what you point it at."
"You mean that if I flick it at my partner then I will 'be' her for 30 seconds and experience exactly how she feels and what she thinks??"
"Yes", the genie responds.
"And when I go back to my own body I will remember what it felt like?"
"Absolutely."
"Awesome! I'm going to try it on my dog first. It won't hurt her, will it?"
"No, but I'd be careful if I were you", the genie replies solemnly.
"Why?"
"Because if you flick the magic wand at anything that isn't sentient, you will vanish."
"Vanish?! Where?" you reply incredulously.
"I'm not sure. Probably nowhere. Where do you vanish to when you die? You'll go wherever that is. So yeah. You probably die."
So: what - if anything - do you point the wand at?
A fly? Your best friend? A chair? Literally anyone? (If no, congratulations! You're a genuine solipsist.) Everything and anything? (Whoa... a genuine panpsychist!)
Probably your dog, though. Surely she IS a good girl and feels like one.
Whatever property you've decided that some things in the universe have and other things do not such that you "know" what you can flick your magic wand at and still live...
That's phenomenal consciousness. That's the hard problem.
Everything else? "Mere" engineering.