“This discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves.”
― Socrates in Plato’s Phaedrus on the dangers of writing

AI is changing the world, like it or not. We’ve seen this play out before. New technologies suddenly break routines and comfort zones.

Are some of the headlines hype? Absolutely.

Is it all just a mirage that’s inflating markets, but ultimately won’t change anything at a fundamental level? Don’t bet on it.

Some people will say “it was better in the old days” and “nobody wants this”, just like they did with smartphones, the Internet, personal computers, cars, etc. Other people will insist “the change is happening too fast” and “people can’t keep up”, just like they did with electricity, the assembly line, radio, and TV. Still others will insist we’re all doomed like people did during the cold war. And don’t forget the people who insist that some version of 1776, the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, the Middle Ages, or ancient Mesopotamia was better so we should go back to a time before all this slop.

I get it. People hate change. Change is risky. Change brings new challenges. Change requires learning and adaptation.

But change happens anyway. It’s inevitable and unavoidable.

Like every technological development of the past, AI has the potential for great good and great harm. It’s already an incredibly powerful tool for many pattern based tasks, like coding, early cancer detection, and voice recognition. But it’s also pretty good at deception and forgery.

So, what should we do?

Living in denial is just avoiding reality. We can’t put the genie back into the bottle, so let’s move past that idea. Instead, we can embrace change and help steer the ship toward its potential for good. We can go out to meet the change head-on and adapt along the way. We can stop competing with technology and start leveraging it.

Don’t just sit on the sidelines watching and complaining about how good things used to be.