[ExI] ai is the easy road

[Ben Zaiboc]

On 11/10/2026 21:27, spike wrote:
>
> This study has the uncomfortable ring of truth:
>
> Using AI for Just 10 Minutes Erodes Your Ability to Persist at Hard Things | Research UC Berkeley
>
> I am not accusing others.  I too have been guilty of just asking Grok rather than thinking it through or calculating it out.
>
> Another possible future scenario is that AI doesn’t kill everybody, but gradually takes over our thinking by being the wise old uncle who knows everything.  It is easier for the kids to just ask him for the answer rather than figure it out the traditional way.



It might be arguable that this is not only inevitable, but desirable.

Humans never evolved as logical or rational thinkers. That type of thinking is difficult for us, it's not our strong point. Yes, we have used it to create our current collection of civilisations, with varying levels of success, but look at all the problems we still have. We use our logical thinking to create pretty remarkable machines, then use them to slaughter and oppress each other. It might be argued that we should stick to what we do best (intuitive, emotional thinking), and let other kinds of being (AIs) do the kind of thinking they arguably already are or almost certainly will be, better at.

It seems inevitable that some type of AI will eventually take over the running of things, and hopefully they will be able to stop us from slaughtering each other. This phenomenon of AI making people mentally lazy could be a step on the way.

Who knows, once they are in charge, they could even help us to get better at rational thinking, and controlling or even eliminating our self-destructive tendencies.

Or they could kill us all, but that seems unlikely to me. There would be no point to it, and it would be destroying something unique, interesting and valuable, which seems the kind of thing that something very powerful, but not very rational might do (which is an argument for developing superintelligent AI as soon as possible).
-- 
Ben
"The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything." - Pablo Casals, via Albert Einstein