What We Stand to Lose in a World Where AI Dominates
The most common conversation around AI involves AI taking our jobs. And make no mistake, that is a legitimate concern, and one that people should take seriously. Many also fear total extinction, with leaders of AI themselves even claiming the possibility of that happening to be around 10%. But let’s put those two outcomes out of our heads for a moment and talk about what else could be lost, in a world where we don’t have The Terminator coming for us, and the unemployment rate is about the same as it has ever been. If we don’t pay attention to those things now, history shows us that it is almost impossible to wind back the clock once we have finally started to notice these quiet costs.
In the age of AI, these costs include the ability, or even the desire to work through disagreements, the ability to feel comfortable in unscripted moments, having the ability to develop emotional vocabulary, and even the ability to retain memories in general. Beyond that, there is a possibility that those who are currently needed forfeit much of their purpose. Many studies focus on those who use AI, and what skills they stand to lose, but think of the other person who was needed before AI was accessible.
There was the friend you called because they were an expert on a subject. Now, you just hand that question over to AI, and while the answer you get might be even better, that friend has missed out on an opportunity to feel useful. Moreover, the two of you have missed out on an opportunity to connect, and who knows what else might have come up in that conversation that started off with you just calling to ask a question about how to fix a leaky faucet.
These are the quiet costs. The ones that aren’t felt immediately, but add up over time. Sure, the example above was one conversation not had, and probably won’t decimate the friendship or make the person on the other end of the call feel purposeless. But over years, over a lifetime, that all adds up. As does our inability to understand a process because every time we needed to do it, we turned to AI for help, rather than an attempt to do it on our own, fail, learn from that failure, and try again. Because it is the friction in life that helps us learn, that helps us find purpose, and helps give us pride when we overcome. And a world in which AI works perfectly, removes nearly all of that friction.
“But the possibility that concerns me most is that it could make us less involved in one another’s lives while giving us good reasons to keep using it.”
From the epilogue, What I Want to Keep
Inside the book
Prologue
I asked a couple a question in our kitchen about using an AI version of a partner to practice an argument. To my surprise, their answers were nothing like mine, and that sent me down a rabbit hole. Many more couples were asked, more research was done, and by the end I had a theory as to why the things that bothered me so much about where we were heading with AI, seemed far less troublesome to other people.
Chapter One
In the first chapter, I take a look at other inflection points in history where a technology that would change the world was starting to become mainstream. From the printing press to the train, along with several others, the trend was clear. We had fears – some reasonable, and some crazy in hindsight – that we tended to focus on while receiving the benefits of that new technology. But what we did not see is the quiet costs, that in many ways became the negative legacies of those technologies.
Chapter Two
Television, GPS, smartphones, and the automobile are all more relatable and recent than the printing press and the train, but many of the same patterns can be seen. There are some differences, however. Namely, that some of these quiet costs were recognized immediately, and even called out. But the benefits were so vast that we actively chose to ignore them, and by the time we began to address them, the technology was such a major part of our everyday life that it was nearly impossible to untangle.
Chapter Seven
Output is one thing, but being able to produce that same output again in the future without aid requires a true knowledge of what the task is and how to perform it. What happens when we turn more and more of our tasks over to AI is that we lose the fundamental understanding of the problems we are trying to solve, and without that context, we might create a world where what we produce is insufficient, but nobody can recognize it because they lack the awareness of what was necessary in the first place.
Chapter Nine
Historically, when a child asks a parent a question that the parent does not know, the two can find an answer out together. And while that process might take longer, it is one that is shared and can lead to a variety of different outcomes, including one in which the child finds the correct answer. That is an example I share, from my own childhood, and it led to a mother that was impressed and an insatiable desire to continue learning for me over the next 40-plus years of my life. That process can mean more than the answer itself, and it is a process that we might lose, thanks to AI.
Chapter Thirteen
My biggest fear is that I announce these costs, and we do what other generations did with their world altering technologies – nod their heads and continue forward all the same. Instead, I would like us to recognize these quiet costs, and realize that just unplugging AI is unrealistic. Instead, in a world of AI, we need to understand the threats and subsidize our AI use with tools, games, everyday practices and exercises that allow us to keep these things we want to keep in a world where AI threatens to take them from us.
Coming 2026
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