AI as Teleportation

Loved the article!

> Here’s one example. If your mental model of reading is “transmit facts into my head”, then reading an AI summary of something might seem like a more efficient way to get that task done.

Once I tried one of the services where instead of audiobooks, you listen to the books' summaries. It actually makes at least a bit of a sense for certain genres of non-fiction like productivity books, which tend to be quite padded out and the ideas can actually be effectively summarized in a much shorter frame.

But I hated it and my knowledge retention was very low. Plus, most of the books cannot be summarized in a way that does not hurt their depth. By definition, you can't go very deep with a summary.

> Another example. One of the great joys of my life is having nerdy friends explain things to me. Now I can get explanations from AI with less friction, anytime, anywhere, with endless follow-up.

> Even if the AI explanations are “better”, there’s a social cost. I can try to mindfully nudge myself to still ask people questions, but now it requires more effort.

I’ve lived alone in the woods for longer than I care to think about. I hate the internet. I deliberately asked my friendly Duck about “Garfield”, wanting to know about the president whose name graced my 9th grade school. I got endless spew about a cartoon cat. The internet has degraded into a “lower than least common denominator” s—-storm. And this was without AI (up front, anyway).

Love people. Be a “real” engineer. Build machines and computers that do fun and socially beneficial things. Don’t give your life away to them.

Learn from my example. Joey, “A Mechanical Boy” [0] had an involuntary medical problem. Don’t go there on purpose.

[0] https://blogs.uoregon.edu/autismhistoryproject/archive/bruno...

> But the biggest change is the loss of serendipity. When you teleport, you decide in advance where you’re headed. You never run into an old friend on the street, or stop at a farmstand by the side of the road, or see a store you might want to stop into someday.

This is the same core argument of the RTO advocates. Serendipity which has social and business benefits, and is in intangible with positive effects that's hard to quantify. But it is undoubtedly a thing, which I think is very hard to argue against.

Coming back to the article, yes, lack of serendipity will not just mute wonder, but also opportunities because, like evolution by natural selection depends on variation, so too do successful human civilizations.