But what concerns me is that authors of articles such as this feel no need to differentiate themselves from other anti-technology arguments in history.
A world without steam engines, cars, computers, printing presses.
The point isn't that the world would be objectively better in every case, but rather that the arguments of "anti-technology people" are frequently rational (and often don't even necessitate an elimination of the technology in question), and using their name as a cudgel as if they were cavemen is a low-quality rhetorical trope haunting all conversation about writing that is critical of AI.
It's also a distraction. If the topic is AI, then it's better to simply talk about the ups and downs of AI than the ups and downs of e.g. cars.
There have been many other thinking technologies and they ALL have been attacked in exactly the same way.
* Socrates attacked the invention of writing, arguing it would make people intellectually lazy.
* Abbot Johannes Trithemius argues in "In Praise of Scribes" in the 15th century that the Gutenberg machine would make people intellectually lazy.
* Lots of people in the 1960s attacked punch card computers, and automation in general (!), on the basis that it would make people intellectually lazy.
* Nicholas Carr attacks Google in a famous article "Is Google Making Us Stupid?", on the basis that it would make people intellectually lazy.
And so on and so on and so on.
"That which has been is what will be, And there is nothing new under the sun."
It is because of this history that any argument such as the author makes, arguing that AI would make people intellectually lazy, must start already from the lamentation of the downfall of human intelligence from the days of Socrates, or must explain why this is different.
It is obviously not different.
There are three mental skills being offloaded onto AI:
1. Domain-specific skills
2. General intelligence (g)
3. Recall
Of these three, the danger with 1 is offloading them too early, before the AI is "good enough" to be better than human experts. This is a genuine concern and we should do things carefully. However, if the AI is good enough, there is no danger here.
Recall is the mental skill that all of these innovations have "hurt", but it can simply be trained explicitly and synthetically. We will certainly have to structure our societies more and more in the future to synthetically exercising recall (like we're now synthetically exercising our muscles), but if we do this, offloading recall at work is not a big issue.
As for general intelligence, this is the most harmless to offload, because, as far as I know from the literature, it cannot really be trained, and it does not really degrade either.
The way the transformers work, getting to the point 1 will probably never be possible - more likely that the capital will just say it is good-enough "in the name of profits" and legislate to protect AI companies against any litigation from AI made mistakes. To a certain extent it is happening already - and all the IP and Copyright theft for model training has been brushed aside already. Yes there are few odd lawsuits here and there but they will be inconsequential and soon forgotten.
Recall is already being massively affected. I see it in our teams at work and I am also affected myself to a point. I very much doubt there will be a massive restructure of societies to allow us to work our brains out - mental gyms. They do exist now, in various chess clubs and are not that popular - that this will become a norm is a wishful thinking, and anyway, we will be too busy fighting one another for the last few remaining jobs.
General Intelligence without Recall and those hard acquired Domain-specific skills means nothing really - just our bioware defaults.
2. I'm sure mental gyms will become common, although I'm not sure if chess is a very good mental gym. It may take a hundred years or so, though.
The argument usually isn't "I believe X will not happen," it's usually either "I believe X should not happen" or "I believe we should manage how X happens".
Why should they? Other "anti-tech" arguments include
- Concern about global warming/pollution
- Resistance to nuclear/chemical warfare
It's not just, or even primarily, that anti-tech arguments are the equivalent of 'cameras will steal souls'.