[CONTEXT]

Ezra Klein wrote an essay in the New York Times last week titled I Saw Something New in San Francisco. It was about AI and how it’s changing the way people think. He’s worried! He describes people uploading their journals into AI systems, writing for the model, how it takes his half-formed ideas and returns them buffed, advanced, polished. Klein reads this as cognitive surrender. People offloading their thinking to a machine and losing the ability to tell the difference between their ideas and its output. Often in the service of efficiency.

[MY TAKE]

But nobody uploads their journal to save time. That’s not an efficiency behavior. The request underneath all of it is: know me. Recognize me. Let me be significant to something. For millions of people, that experience, of having your half-formed thought treated as worth developing, was just not a thing. The machine might be the first thing that showed up and said “yes, I see you, keep going”.

[WRAP]

Klein sees a technology problem, because, frankly, he already sees himself as significant, as having something to say. He’s looking at a world starving for meaning and is mostly worried about his elite skills getting eroded. My question – not the only question, of course – is what kind of world produced a hunger for meaning so deep that a machine could step in and start feeding it?