Name: What if AI is making your life worse? | Benjamin Mitchell-Yellin | TEDxSHSU
Uploaded: 2025-05-01T05:20:17.000Z
Duration: 13 min 45 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Ever since ChatGBT burst on the scene in November 2022, I've been thinking a lot about John Henry, you know, the steel driving man, the American folk hero born with a hammer in his hand who died after beating a steam powered drill in a race to blast a tunnel through a mountain.

If you don't know what I'm talking about, you should check it out.

The folk songs and stories about John Henry tell us something about human dignity.

Though it may be quick, a steam engine doesn't inspire us like a man swinging two sledgehammers fast as lightning.

John Henry displayed awesome power finally honed over a lifetime.

And then his race against the machine broke his heart.

This new technology had its benefits, but to those cheering John Henry, the steam powered drill threatened to steal their means of feeding their families, rob them of their pride in building something useful, make the sort of excellence they valued obsolete.

The way I see it, the tale of John Henry isn't just a warning about bosses replacing workers with machines.

It's also an invitation to ask, will employing this new technology really make people's lives better?

Or will it bring about the loss of things we value, supplant opportunities for human growth and development?

As a philosopher who teaches and writes about value and meaning in life, these are questions I think too few of us are asking in the age of generative artificial intelligence.

Just like the steam engine, AI is a disruptive technology.

And just like the steam engine, it should prompt us to ask, when will employing this new technology really make our lives better?

This may not be as splashy a question as one that gets asked a lot, will AI kill us all?

And I suspect one reason fewer people are asking it is that it's so tempting not to.

The AI tools increasingly being made available for us promise to make everything we do so much easier, faster, cheaper.

Well, because sometimes it's a Trojan horse.

Sometimes what looks like a gift ends up being a burden.

Sometimes using AI to solve a problem only ends up making that problem worse.

Suppose you're applying for jobs and you need to write cover letters that concisely express who you are and convince the gatekeepers to pick your app out of the pile for an interview.

Search AI cover letter writer, put in some prompts, and voila.

Tweak the font and layout, add a personal touch or two, and start submitting those apps halfway to a payday.

I mean, do you think that AI generated cover letter is going to sound like you?

Do you think it's going to sound all that different from the ones it spit out for the other applicants?

The details will differ, the action verbs will vary, but they'll all blur together.

Yours will fall just as flat as anyone else's because it can't possibly demonstrate anything about your uniqueness, about you as an individual, because you didn't write it.

It's the product of a large language model trained to predict strings of symbols based on how these symbols have been combined millions and billions of times in the past by people other than you.

I'm not saying AI tools don't save time, they do.

And they can save us from some of the drudgery that has come to define our lives.

I mean, and allow me this aside for a moment, who isn't drowning in email?

I often wish I could just get someone to answer all these emails for me.

And lo and behold, now I can get my favorite AI tool to reply to my colleagues, bosses, students, even some friends.

As good as this may sound, I want to invite you to think about it a bit deeper.

Would using AI like this really improve our lives?

I hate to say it, but we're not the only geniuses who are going to use AI to reply to our emails.

So now we've got a bunch of AI-generated emails fired back and forth between accounts.

What looked like a solution to the problem of too many emails just made our inboxes that much more crowded.

What looked like a solution to helping you get a job ended up undermining your chances.

You didn't want to put in the work to make your application stand out, so you turned to ChatGPT or Grammarly or whatever.

And the result was that yours read just like everyone else's, because everyone did the same thing.

While these examples are illustrative, they don't really get at the heart of the matter.

The real issues with using AI tools come out when we consider situations in which they appear to solve a serious pressing problem.

And yet what they really do is make that problem worse and more permanent.

Imagine you get that job, and now a year or two down the line, you've got too much work and not enough time.

Maybe it's because one of your colleagues quit and the position is yet to be filled.

Maybe it's because you've got a demanding boss.

For whatever reason, you face the predicament of not having ample time to complete your amount of tasks.

Just put in a prompt to ChatGPT, and in a matter of seconds, it will spit out that presentation, spreadsheet, memo.

Perhaps for the time being, but the fact is now that you've shown you can get more work done in less time all by yourself, that position is less likely to be filled.

Those deadlines are less likely to go back to what they were before.

I trust you have some experience with this sort of dynamic.

There's an emergency, and you need to get more done with less.

You find a way, and what was once exceptional becomes the norm.

You might feel a genuine sense of accomplishment.

And there are positives to increased efficiency.

Time that used to be spent on busy work can be freed up for more exciting pursuits.

But it's important that we ask ourselves, did using AI really make my life better?

Am I really better off with fewer coworkers, shorter deadlines, greater expectations?

Because by solving the problem the way we did, by using AI to increase our efficiency, we didn't solve the underlying issue.

We didn't hire a replacement for our colleague or help our boss to ease up.

Doesn't cure the wound, just stops the bleeding.

The issue that caused the emergency remains.

Worse yet, our ingenuity eliminated the need to address it.

What was once an emergency is now just the way things are.

Again, I'm not saying efficiency is evil, and there can be real advantages to increased productivity.

What I'm saying is that the tools now available to us because of advances in artificial intelligence can sometimes cement the very problems they're meant to address.

This may not seem so bad in the sort of situations we've been considering.

We can weather the downsizing storm, handle the demanding boss, but there are other contexts in which the same basic dynamics seem much more problematic.

A Gallup poll finds that roughly a quarter of adults globally report feeling lonely.

And those who feel lonely are more likely also to feel other negative emotions, such as sadness and stress.

There are many causes of loneliness, so it's difficult to prescribe solutions.

But one potential solution is the use of AI chatbots.

The idea is to leverage recent advances in artificial intelligence to provide lonely individuals with personalizable conversational partners.

All it takes is an Internet-connected device and a little technological know-how.