Opinion | Actually, A.I. Is Pretty Mid - The New York Times

Summary

Summarized wtih ChatGPT

The article argues that artificial intelligence (A.I.) is often overhyped and has produced mostly mediocre improvements in various fields. It emphasizes that while A.I. has potential benefits, it primarily serves to streamline mundane tasks rather than revolutionize work or education. The author warns that A.I. can undermine expertise and demoralize workers, making it crucial to critically assess its role in society.

Key Takeaways:

1. A.I. is often more about minor improvements than groundbreaking changes.
2. Expertise and education remain vital for effectively using A.I. technology.
3. It’s important to scrutinize the implications of A.I. on jobs and professional integrity.

Highlights from Article

Consumers who fancy themselves early adopters get a lot of mileage out of A.I.’s predictive power, but they accept a lot of bugginess and poor performance to live in the future before everyone else.

Cuban exemplified this in a recent post on the social media platform Bluesky. He imagined an A.I.-enabled world where a worker with “zero education” uses A.I. and a skilled worker doesn’t. The worker who gets on the A.I. train learns to ask the right questions and the numbskull of a skilled worker does not. The former will often be, in Cuban’s analysis, the more productive employee. The problem is that asking the right questions requires the opposite of having zero education. You can’t just learn how to craft a prompt for an A.I. chatbot without first having the experience, exposure and, yes, education to know what the heck you are doing. The reality — and the science — is clear that learning is a messy, nonlinear human development process that resists efficiency. A.I. cannot replace it.

• AI right now is killing the ability to think when, in reality, a power user of AI is one who can think critically.

Another way to put that is that A.I. wants workers who make decisions based on expertise without an institution that creates and certifies that expertise. Expertise without experts.

All material owns to the authors, of course. If I’m highlighting or writing notes on this, I mostly likely recommend reading the original article, of course.

See other recent things I’ve read here.