0:23 ever since chat GPT burst on the scene in November 2022 I've been thinking a lot about John Henry you know the steel driving man the American folk hero born with a hammer in his hand who died after beating a steam power drill in a race to bless a tunnel through a mountain if you don't know what I'm talking about you should check it out Google it later the folk songs and stories about John Henry tell us something about human dignity though it may be quick a steam engine doesn't Inspire us like a man swinging two sledgehammers fast as Lightning John Henry displayed awesome power finally owned over a lifetime and then his Race Against the Machine broke his heart this new technology had its benefits but to those cheering John
1:09 Henry the steam power drill threatened to steal their means of feeding their families Rob them of their pride in building something useful make the sort of Excellence they valued obsolete the way I see it the tale of John Henry isn't just a warning about bosses replacing workers with machines it's also an invitation to ask will employing this new technology really make people's lives better or will it bring about the loss of things we value supplant opportunities for human growth and development as a philosopher who teaches and writes about value and meaning in life these are questions I think too few of us are asking in the age of generative artificial intelligence just like the steam engine
1:55 AI is a disruptive technology and just like the steam engine it should prompt us to ask when will employing this new technology really make our lives better this may not be a splashy a question as one that gets asked a lot will AI kill us all but it's no less important and I suspect one reason fewer people are asking it is that it's so tempting not to the AI tools increasingly being made available for us promise to make everything we do so much easier faster cheaper why look a gift horse in the mouth well because sometimes it's a trojan horse sometimes what looks like a gift ends up being a burden Sometimes using AI to solve a problem only ends up making that problem
2:41 worse let's think through some examples suppose you're applying for jobs and you need to write cover letters that concisely Express who you are and convince The Gatekeepers to pick your app out of the pile for an interview just the sort of thing AI was made for search AI cover letter writer put in some prompts and voila tweak the font and layout add a personal touch or to and start submitting those apps halfway to a Payday well maybe maybe not I mean do you think that AI generated cover letter is going to sound like you do you think it's going to sound all that different from the ones that spit out for the other applicants the details will differ the action verbs will vary but they'll all blur together yours will fall just as
3:27 flat as anyone else's because it can't Poss possibly demonstrate anything about your uniqueness about you as an individual because you didn't write it it's the product of a large language model trained to predict strings of symbols based on how these symbols have been combined millions and billions of times in the past by people other than you I'm not saying AI tools don't save time they do and they can save us from some of the drudgery that has come to Define Our Lives I mean and allow me this aside for a moment who isn't drowning an email I know I am often wish I could just get someone to answer all these emails for me and lo and behold now I can get my favorite AI tool to reply to my colleagues bosses students
4:14 even some friends as good as this may sound I want to invite you to think about it a bit deeper would using AI like this really improve our lives I hate to say it but we're not the only Geniuses who are going to use AI to reply to our emails so now we've got a bunch of AI generated emails fired back and forth between accounts What looked like a solution to the problem of too many emails just made our inboxes that much more crowded email always wins or go back to your cover letters what looked like a solution to helping you get a job ended up undermining your chances you didn't want to put in the work to make your application stand out so you turned to chat GPT or grammarly or whatever and
5:01 the result was that yours read just like everyone else's cuz everyone did the same thing while these examples are illustrative they don't really get at the heart of the matter the real issues with using AI tools come out when we consider situations in which they appear to solve a serious pressing problem and yet what they really do is make that problem worse and more permanent imagine you get that job and now a year or two down the line you've got too much work and not enough time time maybe it's because one of your colleagues quit and the position is yet to be filled maybe it's because you got a demanding boss for whatever reason you face the predicament of not having ample time to complete your amount of tasks I trust you know the feeling maybe
5:47 you even know the solution AI can save the day no need to fret just put in a prompt to chat gbt and in a matter of second it'll spit out that presentation spreadsheet memo short staff no problem overzealous Boss No Sweat what a relief right perhaps for the time being but the fact is now that you've shown you can get more work done and less time all by yourself that position's less likely to be filled those deadlines are less likely to go back to what they were before I trust you have some experience with this sort of dynamic there's an emergency and you need to get more done with less you find a way and what was once exceptional becomes the nor you might feel a genuine sense of accomplishment I don't want to take that
6:34 away from you and there are positives to increase deficiency lower costs can lead to lower prices time that used to be spent on busy work can be freed up for more exciting Pursuits but it's important that we ask ourselves did using AI really make my life better am I really better off with fewer co-workers shorter deadlines greater expectations because by solving the problem the way we did by using AI to increase our efficiency we didn't solve the underlying issue we didn't hire a replacement for our colleague or help our boss to ease up instead we found a workaround that workaround is like a Band-Aid doesn't cure the wound just stops the bleeding the issue that caused the emergency
7:20 remains worse yet our Ingenuity eliminated the need to address it what was once an emergency is now just the way things are are welcome to the new normal again I'm not saying efficiency is evil and there can be real advantages to increased productivity what I'm saying is that the tools now available to us because of advances in artificial intelligence can sometimes cement the very problems they're meant to address this may not seem so bad in the sort of situations we've been considering we can weather the downsizing storm handled the demanding boss but there are other contexts in which the same basic dynamic seem much more problematic consider loneliness a Gallop pole finds that roughly a quarter of
8:06 adults globally report feeling lonely and those who feel lonely are more like more likely also to feel other negative emotions such as sadness and stress there are many causes of loneliness so it's difficult to prescribe Solutions but one potential solution is the use of AI chat Bots the idea is to leverage recent advances in artificial intelligence to provide lonely individuals with personalizable conversational Partners perhaps they'll even fall in love all it takes is an Internet connected device in a little technological knowhow and the figures sound promising in 2023 the GSM Association reported that over half the world's population owned a smartphone over 4 and a half billion people can chat with an AI on their own personal
8:53 mobile device but will this make them less lonely some research looks promising but when I think about it my first impulse wouldn't be to hand a lonely person a smartphone no matter how well-meaning I may be and trying to connect them with a source of conversation this feels insensitive like I'm brushing them off not really feeling their plight it feels robotic as sociologist Sher turo points out AI chat Bots are incapable of genuine empathy these tools may have wide application but they're an imperfect solution at best and they key imperfection their inability to supply the sort of social recognition that's lacking when people feel lonely suggest their widespread use will make the problem worse instead of supplying
9:41 lonely people with human contact they'll be given an inferior replica of social stimulation these uses of AI may be developed in good faith but they aren't up to the task what immediate relief they may bring comes at the cost of further entrenching the very problems they're meant to solve does this mean we should never use AI that these tools can never improve our lives that takes it too far there are uses that still seem promising like AI translation apps these can help people Access healthcare and other essential services and situations where they otherwise couldn't but even here we need to be Discerning using a translation app to complete your Spanish homework isn't the same thing as using it to communicate your symptoms to a provider who doesn't
10:27 speak your language these apps can help plug gaps in services that would take massive systemic change to fix we can't just go out and hire more translators or motivate multilingual professionals to relocate to rural communities in need but we can find time to study even if it's at the end of a busy day and resist shortcuts that undermine true learning my point is that we won't be in a position to tell the difference between uses of AI that improve our lives and ones that don't if we never even ask the question in fact it's not just one question we should be asking I want to leave you with a set of questions to ask yourself the next time you're tempted to use an AI tool to complete an everyday task first am I using this tool for a
11:13 good purpose getting medical treatment's worthwhile cheating on homework isn't second would I be missing out on something worthwhile if I were to replace my usual way of achieving this goal with a process that involves AI it may be faster to have chat gbt write your cover letter for you but don't forget John Henry's lesson faster is not necessarily better the steam drill doesn't display Human Excellence it supplants it having an AI write your cover letter for you robs you of the opportunity to grow as a writer who knows writing it yourself may even give you a chance to crystallize your sense of your own professional identity our lives are better the more opportunities we have to develop our
11:58 human skills and understanding third is the time or money I would be saving by using this AI tool being put to good use it's one thing to complete my work faster so I can spend more time with the ones I love it's another thing entirely for me to Simply have more tasks piled on my desk fourth and finally how does using AI interact with the systems and structures that shape Our Lives knowing that your aging parent can chat with a customized chat bot may make you feel less wary placing them in a nursing home may make you feel less guilty about skipping your weekly visit but that chatbot cannot truly take your place no matter how much it may ease
12:45 your mind I realize life comes with all manner of pressures some easier to escape than others and I don't want to give the impression I think all technology is bad but if I can leave you with anything I hope it's a healthy dose of curiosity not all uses of AI are created equal there's value in asking when does using AI really make my life better no matter what answer you arrive at at least you'll have resisted the Temptation not to ask the question in the first place and who knows maybe doing so will help you to grow as a person make your life just a little bit better in the long run thank you
