I've been thinking about AI dependency, because many ppl have told me that relying on AI is already making them forget how to do parts of their jobs.
In some sense this is nothing new. Technology has always replaced skills that used to be essential. We stopped doing calculations by hand because calculators exist, and we stopped memorizing information because computers can store it for us.
AI may be the same process taken to its extreme, because instead of replacing one skill, it can replace parts of writing, programming, research, engineering and even reasoning itself.
There is a possible future where humans become simple interfaces between AI output and the real world: AI thinks, we execute. And with robotics, even that role could disappear.
Local and open AI may prevent intelligence from being completely controlled by a few companies, but there is another possibility: frontier models could keep getting bigger until only giant datacenters can run the best ones.
Then compute becomes an extremely important form of capital. A company with enough AI and robotics could potentially enter almost any industry, creating an enormous concentration of economic power and reducing the value of human labor.
But I think there is an important limit to this scenario: verification.
The problem isn't simply that AI makes errors. Humans make errors too, and AI will probably become one of our best tools for detecting them.
The deeper problem is whether we can trust things we don't understand.
In mathematics, an AI could create a proof far too complicated for a human to read, while a simpler formal system verifies that the proof is correct.
But reality is different.
An AI can prove that a building is safe given certain assumptions, but somebody still has to verify that those assumptions actually describe reality. Models can miss things, measurements can be wrong, and machine learning systems can fail in strange and unexpected ways.
Imagine an AI designs a skyscraper and has a historical failure rate of zero. Would you let hundreds of thousands of ppl live in the next one if no human engineer understands why the building works?
I wouldn't.
This makes me think that human technological progress may eventually be limited by verifiability, not invention.
An advanced AI might be able to invent technology far beyond what humans could create, but if nobody understands why it works or why it is safe, we may be unable to use it.
That doesn't mean humans need to repeat everything the AI does. An AI could search through billions of designs and return the best one. The engineer only needs to understand and verify the final design, its assumptions and its possible failure modes.
The problem is that human verification is limited by our biological brains.
And this is where transhumanism becomes important.
Our brains are physical information-processing systems. If injuries can reduce memory and reasoning ability, it seems possible that artificial augmentation could eventually increase them.
Right now our interface with computers is extremely slow: typing with our fingers and reading from screens. Imagine instead that computer processing and memory could become directly integrated with our cognition.
An AI could spend months of computation creating something, while an augmented engineer could understand and verify the result in hours.
In that future AI could become something like an extremely advanced calculator: it does the enormous search and repetitive reasoning, while the human still understands why the final answer makes sense.
So maybe the future isn't simply:
AI becomes smarter → humans become useless.
Maybe AI becomes more intelligent while humans become more augmented.
Books, computers, the internet and smartphones already expanded our mental capabilities. Neural interfaces could be the next step, until the distinction between "I used a computer to think about this" and "I thought about this" becomes blurry.
There will never be perfect verification. Reality can always surprise us.
But instead of removing humans from the loop, perhaps we can enlarge the human loop itself.
AI does the enormous search.
AI detects mistakes.
Augmented humans remain capable of understanding why the result should be trusted.
And if that is possible, advanced AI may not make human intelligence obsolete.
It may force us to expand it.
Edit: Some final thoughts, access to AI data centers will probably be fundamental for the success of any business in the future, that depends on other factors but ultimately I could say that we need way more data centers, so no single company becomes a gate keeper, think what linux is in the OS sector.
[link] [comments]