You know what frosts my flakes?
Frequent notifications telling me to shake my phone for an AI summary.
Have we really reached the point where reading something ourselves is too much work?
If I use Firefox to open a news story, visit a website or spend more than six seconds looking at something on my phone, and accidentally move the device, I get a notification asking “Summarize with a shake?”
No, thank you. My brain still works.
Apparently, all I need to do is shake my phone and artificial intelligence will swoop in and tell me what I’m looking at so I don’t have to suffer the unbearable burden of actually reading it.
Let me get this straight.
News stories have already been shortened because people supposedly don’t have the attention span to read anything longer than three paragraphs.
Then we got headlines designed to tell us the whole story so we wouldn’t have to read those three paragraphs.
Now even THAT is apparently too much work.
Just shake the phone!
AI will chew up the information, digest it and spit out a tiny little summary containing just enough information for me to think I know what happened.
I’m guessing the next step is a 140-character summary so I can immediately rush over to social media and share my newfound expertise with the world.
Why bother reading? Why bother researching? Why bother thinking? Just shake the phone and let AI do it for you!
Look, I use artificial intelligence. It can be incredibly helpful. But does it have to insert itself into absolutely EVERYTHING we do?
At some point, we’re going to shake our phones and get a message saying:
“You appear confused. Would you like AI to form an opinion for you?”
I’m Grandpa Grumpy and this rush to turn over every aspect of our lives to artificial intelligence is starting to frost more than my flakes. I’m afraid someday we’ll shake our phones and discover there’s nothing left rattling around upstairs.