The better AI gets at doing our work for us, the more we outsource our thinking to it. Thus, as we make machines more humanlike, they make us more machinelike. Perhaps we should be less worried about AI becoming conscious, than about humanity becoming unconscious.

The view that imagines AI wiping out jobs or causing some overnight shock to the system doesn’t contemplate that companies are a made up of a series of bottlenecks. When AI accelerates work in one area, you run into a bottleneck somewhere else. As any individual workflow gets more efficient, the ultimate productivity... See more