Science fiction author Neal Stephenson, who popularized the concept and term “metaverse” in his seminal book Snow Crash (1992), recently spoke at a conference in New Zealand on the promise and peril of AI.
His (brief but razor-sharp) remarks are well worth reading in full, but this quote stood out:
“Speaking of the effects of technology on individuals and society as a whole, Marshall McLuhan wrote that every augmentation is also an amputation. […] This is the main thing I worry about currently as far as AI is concerned. I follow conversations among professional educators who all report the same phenomenon, which is that their students use ChatGPT for everything, and in consequence learn nothing. We may end up with at least one generation of people who are like the Eloi in H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine, in that they are mental weaklings utterly dependent on technologies that they don’t understand and that they could never rebuild from scratch were they to break down.”
