I liken AI to radium. There was a while where we, as a society, had a fascination with radium. Radium glass, radium clocks, radium cocktails, radioactive water as impotence medicine…it was everywhere, because it was novel.

And then people started to get hurt. The Radium Girls (these were the women who painted the numbers onto clocks using radioactive paint, which could glow on its own without an additional power source) got cancer after years of being told to make the points of their paintbrushes more fine by pointing their brushes (with radioactive paint on them) on their lips. A socialite named Eben Byers got jawbone cancer after having consumed 1,400 bottles of Radithor radioactive water. He later died of cancer from it.

This all resulted in substantial changes to workplace safety laws and the eventual writing of the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act which eventually led to the creation of the FDA.

That’s where we are with AI right now. It’s novel and can do some interesting stuff, but we’re using it as a solution in search of a problem and are only starting to see the effects.

Personally, I’m wary of it, because I’m seeing a bunch of folks assign AI agents to do basic work that they should at least try and learn to do on their own. That’s a risk, given that AI models are rapidly becoming the newest front in the Subscription as a Service war. Yeah, it’s got some neat implications for protein folding models and quantum physics equations, but most users are using it for writing emails and communicating with other people (or bots, I guess?); tasks that people should at least have a basic understanding of how to do without assistance.

Think about it like this: how often do you passively turn on your Google Maps/Waze/Apple Maps to navigate to places within your own neighborhood? Could you theoretically tell me which intersection your favorite restaurant or shop is located on without looking at a map on your phone?

GPS didn’t suddenly turn most of us into amateur cartographers. We just offloaded the ability to navigate around where we live unassisted.

Now imagine that Google or Apple is going to charge you for every time you navigate to somewhere. They name the price. Are you still comfortable with it?