"Without stress". A lot of work is going on there for that phrase. Because yeah, learning is stressful. Creating is stressful. Struggling with something difficult is uncomfortable by definition. But is stress free consumption really what man needs? Or do we need the friction? There's research to suggest that humans need a challenge to make them feel alive. Not constant suffering, but of experiencing the process of working towards something, of becoming competent at something that was once hard.
Maybe we get better outputs yeah. But do we get better humans? Do we get to people who know themselves, who have confidence in their own capabilities, who know that they have the capacity to affect the world directly?
Or do we just get real efficient consumers?
There is no learning or growth involved without stress, anyone who believes otherwise is foolishly naive and lazy. There is no going around it. It is usually people who are stupid, fat, or poor that are envious of the people that are very active. You can think about this from any angle that you want. When it comes both to physical or mental progress, the gains are centered in stressful environments. If you are doing anything such a physics or mathematics that are very easy for you, and there is no stress involved, then you are not really learning anything significant. Most of humanity's progress comes from dealing with the most difficult, and often most stressful, problems. All this AI stuff will lead to the same things that smart IOT devices did, it creates much dumber consumers that don't know how to change a simple light bulb.
Anybody use ebay lately? If so, have you read sellers' descriptions of their items for sale? It's the most idiotic system I've ever seen--ebay gives sellers AI tools to write those descriptions for them, and so often they describe what's for sale in the most general terms you can think of; nothing about the condition or things a buyer would really want to know when they're going to be purchasing something from a stranger.
And on top of that, ebay's recommendation to sellers (so as not to have a bunch of returns ending up on their doorstep) is to describe items for sale in as much detail as possible. The two things aren't compatible, and yeah AI has made a LOT of ebay sellers lazier than I thought possible.
Seems like we've barely even gotten started with AI, too. Ugh.
Everything is broken since the arrival of AI slop. Wherever you look you can find this. Most YouTube comments are now AI slop often upvoted by bots, most posts on Reddit, X, and so forth. Marketplaces are ruined, freelance platforms are ruined, any kind of contest is full of AI entries and so forth. Who would have guessed that giving stupid humans the ability to generate content that is of higher quality or that fosters laziness would turn the world to shit? Right? Nobody predicted that?
