Do we need AI chatbots? Are they making our lives easier – or just faster? This absolute cracker of a rant by Brett Scott poses some hard questions:

Consider the current AI hype. Believing that AI will save time is like being a person in the late 1800s seeing their first car and thinking “oh how easy it’ll be to get to the meadow now!” People back then didn’t imagine that by the 1960s we’d be stuck in traffic jams for hours in mega-cities. Now apply this to AI. If we fast-forward a decade, it will have recalibrated the entire economy to a state of higher acceleration where you’ll be expected to do far more, at much greater scale, in the same amount of time. At that point, if you’re not using it you’ll feel like a 19th century villager who finds themselves trying to walk to work in the middle of modern Los Angeles.

All technologies come with tradeoffs – and it’s not a good idea to adopt a new technology practice until we’ve taken the measure of that tradeoff.

Read the full post here.