I think part of the negative attitude towards the effects of AI stems from the fact that it demolishes a lot of structure. The traditional institutes maintain well-structured, low-entropy societies in terms of knowledge: one goes to a lawyer for legal advice or to a doctor for medical advice, one goes/send one's children to a university for higher education, etc. One knows what to do and whom to ask. With the advent of internet, this started to change, and now the old system is almost useless: as you note, it may be more efficient to go to AI for legal advice, and AI is definitely more knowledgeable about most things than most university teachers, if used correctly. In the limit, the society as it existed before is not simply transformed but is completely gone: everybody is a fully autonomous agent with a $AI_PROVIDER subscription. Ditto for professional groups and other types of association that were needed to organise and disseminate knowledge (what is a lawyer these days? a person with a $LEGAL_AI_PROVIDER subscription, if this is even a thing? what is a SWE?). Now we live in a maximum-entropy situation. How do values evolve and disseminate in this scenario? Everybody has an AI-supported opinion about what is right. How do we agree? How do we decided on the next steps? AI doesn't give us a structure for that.
> AI is definitely more knowledgeable about most things than most university teachers
I think this is under-appreciated so much. Yes, every university professor is going to know more about quite a lot of things than ChatGPT does, especially in their specialty, but there is no university professor on earth who knows as much about as many things as ChatGPT, nor do they have the patience or time to spend explaining what they know to people at scale, in an interactive way.
I was randomly watching a video about calculus on youtube this morning and didn't understand something (Feynman's integration trick) and then spent 90 minutes talking to ChatGPT getting some clarity on the topic, and finding related work and more reading to do about it, along with help working through more examples. I don't go to college. I don't have a college math teacher on call. Wikipedia is useless for learning anything in math that you don't already know. ChatGPT has endless patience to drill down on individual topics and explaining things at different levels of expertise.
This is just a capability for individual learning that _didn't exist before ai_ and we have barely begun to unlock it for people.
