Here’s Stephenson, from his Substack:
Speaking of the effects of technology on individuals and society as a whole, Marshall McLuhan wrote that every augmentation is also an amputation. I first heard that quote twenty years ago from a computer scientist at Stanford who was addressing a room full of colleagues—all highly educated, technically proficient, motivated experts who well understood the import of McLuhan’s warning and who probably thought about it often, as I have done, whenever they subsequently adopted some new labor-saving technology. Today, quite suddenly, billions of people have access to AI systems that provide augmentations, and inflict amputations, far more substantial than anything McLuhan could have imagined. 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. Earlier I spoke somewhat derisively of lapdogs. We might ask ourselves who is really the lapdog in a world full of powerful AIs.
To me this seems like a downside of AI that is easy to understand, easy to measure, with immediate effects, that could be counteracted tomorrow through simple interventions such as requiring students to take examinations in supervised classrooms, writing answers out by hand on blank paper. We know this is possible because it’s how all examinations used to be taken. No new technology is required, nothing stands in the way of implementation other than institutional inertia, and, I’m afraid, the unwillingness of parents to see their children seriously challenged. In the scenario I mentioned before, where humans become part of a stable but competitive ecosystem populated by intelligences of various kinds, one thing we humans must do is become fit competitors ourselves. And when the competition is in the realm of intelligence, that means preserving and advancing our own intelligence by holding at arms length seductive augmentations in order to avoid suffering the amputations that are their price.
Neal Stephenson – Remarks on AI from NZ
Stephenson (like Marshall McLuhan before him) isn’t arguing against augmentation – just that we should be aware of its consequences.
I have a counter-example: augmentation leading to strengthening of skills. We talk in the west about the atrophying of map-reading and navigation skills caused by satnav. I’ve seen the opposite happen in Indonesia, where fifteen years ago most people you asked for directions were not skilled at using maps even to describe places they knew well – but now are well-practiced in using Googlemaps or equivalent for navigation, and much better at map-reading as a result. Better quality (lighter, cheaper, easier-to-use) sports equipment has lead to greater participation in sport.
Gaining a smart friend or an excellent freelancer or would seem to be this kind of augmentation… and adding an AI to your circle of sources (or employees) isn’t so different.