Refrigeration was the beginning of the downfall of humanity

There are certainly ways this can be true. I discussed several of them with a friend while out running today. But the same is true for many other things we have done: the Industrial Revolution, cars, the internet… or as a better writer than me put it:

“Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake coming down from the trees in the first place, and some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no-one should ever have left the oceans.” — Douglas Adams

Today, that issue is AI. It is a wild thing right now. There is vast potential for us to do things never before possible, and equally vast potential to do things terrible.

But I think I’m into it. Ultimately, I have faith in humans.

It’s a tool. I’m even using it to help write this post.

First draft of this post

I don’t think of it as anything different than spellcheck or the first word processors were. It isn’t magic; it’s a utility. A flawed one, at that. Just moments ago, Gemini vomited a completely fictitious email out of nowhere when I merely asked for some simple formatting. It was confident, wrong, and hilarious.

Like anything, we just need to learn how to wield it. Yes, some people are using it for terrible things (cough, Musk/Grok, cough), but there are just as many—and I believe far more—people out there creating wonderful things with it.

I’ve never been worried about the “glut of crappy AI content.” There have always been humans pumping out crappy content, too. We will still see amazing new things because an AI agent helped a person learn a new skill that took them to a place nobody has ever been before.

We survived the trees, we survived refrigeration, and I’m pretty sure we’ll survive this, too.