Video: Opinion | Are You Playing the Technology or Is the Technology Playing You?

"I think the fear that a lot of us have about generative A.I. is that we're not going to be playing it. It's going to be playing us. Often because we prefer it to play us, right. When a kid you can use A.I. to help you write a better essay, but a lot of people just want the A.I. to write the essay, right. The whole essay. The whole essay, yeah."

"And I think that space between are you playing the technology or is the technology playing you is a very tricky one. And I think that's one of my more dystopic versions of our A.I. future. My kids' future in A.I. is a world in which they've given up a lot of their own agency, because it seems a little bit ridiculous to take it."

"I mean, there's a million technologies that I Like, I'm happy I have Google Maps; I have a bad sense of direction and I'm not trying to make it better. But there is some line where you are acting upon the world versus the world is just acting through you that I think is going to be very hard to police."

"Yes, I think what bothers me, which is exactly part of what you're saying, is the possibility of not making a mistake at all, of making things that always come with this professional, finished gloss of what a real pop song looks like, or what a real picture looks like. And I think that's lethal. I have a friend, an architect friend, called Rem Koolhaas. He's a Dutch architect, and he uses this phrase, the premature sheen."

Generative AI can shift agency from humans to systems by making it easier and preferable to outsource decisions and creative work. Many people may choose fully produced outputs rather than learning through error, which can diminish skill development and experimentation. Convenience-driven adoption creates a boundary where the world begins acting through people instead of people acting upon the world. Polished, professional-looking outputs remove the roughness that fosters discovery, producing a premature sheen. The reduction of mistakes and process visibility risks homogenizing creative outcomes and weakening individual autonomy and problem-solving over time.

Read at www.nytimes.com