If AI does everything, what’s left for us?

Almost everyone nowadays knows about AI or uses it in their daily life. More specifically, i'm talking about large language models like ChatGPT. Questions like: 'How do I get from A to B in this city?', 'What should I eat tonight?', 'Can you summarize this text?' are commonly asked and can save us a lot of time, but what effect does this have on us and our future? Is AI thinking for us? Let's dive a little deeper...

AI at school

As an example, let's say you are a student currently in highschool and have to write an essay. Using AI, there’s two obvious ways to go; either you use an AI like ChatGPT as a tool to assist you and you write your essay with a little help where needed….. or you let AI do all the magic, hand in the generated essay and call it a day.

For now, let’s take a look at the second example. As AI advances, teachers will undoubtedly start using it to grade essays faster and more efficiently. This means that eventually you will have essays made by AI and graded by AI, removing the whole purpose of school as there is no learning involved for the student.

As AI improves and learns to do all sorts of tasks, like teaching and grading, teachers would slowly become less necessary and would eventually be replaced by AI, just like countless other jobs.

Let’s take it a step further; think about everyone that made not just their essays, but also their homework with AI. What if they use it even for other stuff in their daily life?

These people would soon grow up to be more and more dependent on their ‘all-knowing’ source of information, which gets even worse when you think about how AI will slowly be integrated into common household items and stuff we use everyday, like your smart fridge or vacuum cleaner.

The AI take-over

Eventually nobody would be able to live without it, heck, I even find myself using it more than I should to look up even the most basic things, like ‘How long should I cook an egg’ — something that would’ve been a quick Google search, but instead was asked to ChatGPT. Sure, it is helpful and gives you a quick answer, but at this pace we will slowly forget how to figure out things on our own. Besides, all those small questions cost huge amounts of energy to be generated, but that’s a topic for another day.

The point is, if everyone is using AI to do basically every little thing for us, then it would kind of take away the whole point of life — discovering and experiencing new things, and doing stuff in general. And you could argue that if AI does all the annoying tasks, we get more time and freedom to do the things that we like. But without the annoying or boring tasks that we as humans have to do, the stuff that we do for fun becomes less fun because it won’t be special anymore. It’s like eating pizza everyday for a month (Doesn't sound that bad though). We are supposed to be bored sometimes, or do the annoying tasks; it's part of life.

Our future is doomed…

Or is it? Like I said at the beginning, letting AI do everything is a choice that we ourselves can make. Besides, there will always be things that humans could hardly ever be replaced in, like thinking of new ideas, creating strong concepts, feeling emotions, etc. These things are what make us human.

Maybe if we give an advanced AI a body and let it experiment and interact with its surroundings, just maybe it would be able to invent something. But that is just a speculation, and something for us to figure out in the future.

Conclusion

For now, moral of the story is: Use AI, but use it as a tool to assist you, gather inspiration, and brainstorm with. And if you have simple questions, like 'how to bake an apple pie?', consider using Google instead (Or ask your grandma for the recipe).