These days I long for the time when staring at a wall was how society filled their time rather than arguing or chatting with an artificial intelligence agent whose data we have no idea where it is going or what it is being used for. I miss the days when I called my insurance company and an AI voice wasn’t only giving me three options I could choose from. The days when I actually had to open up a website on Google to find new information rather than be told the synopsis through the AI Overview.
I miss when AI was a choice to engage with, rather than it being embedded into every technology we now use.
Pre-AI Boom
In the past decade, AI has made its mark on society and influenced academics and everyday people wonder what exactly AI is used for. Artificial Intelligence has been studied since the early 1950s, and starting in 2010 AI has had major breakthroughs to deliver the technology that we now know. The Swiss Cyber Institute outlines the history of AI beginning with virtual assistants emerging in 2010. In 2011 Apple released Siri on the iPhone and in 2014, Ian Goodfellow introduced Generative Adversarial Networks that allowed computers to generate realistic images and media. In 2016, AlphaGo showed how neural networks could master intuitive strategy, and in 2017, Google introduced a Transformer model that serves as the foundation for modern language models used in places like ChatGPT, Gemini, and other chatbot services.
Shortly after Google introduced the Transformer model, OpenAI launched GPT-2 in 2020, and two years after the launch, OpenAI publicly released ChatGPT, which brought generative AI into mainstream daily use within weeks. Years later, OpenAI is still developing its model, while major tech companies have been embedding their own AI into generative software that users once could choose to engage with.
Automated Thinking
Alan Turing posed the question, “Can machines think?” This question quickly became revolutionary within the technology world. AI was created as a tool to perform complex reasoning or mathematical theorems. Today, the main goal of artificial intelligence is to build smart machines that solve complex- real world problems, automate tasks, and act as a labor substitute. OpenAI released this technology, unknowingly starting a new competition over who could get a better and quicker AI out to the public as fast as possible. ChatGPT threatened how people looked up information; well-established search engines could become irrelevant, and smartphones and software had new competition that was out of human hands. Silicon Valley was shaken, and companies became fearful of not being the frontrunner in this new technology and soon Google, Microsoft, Apple, and many other major tech companies quickly developed their own way of implementing this technology within their own systems.
The race to build AI began, and data centers started popping up across the country. Billions of dollars were being spent and investors demanded to see a return on investment. In the beginning, AI was used as a separate tool rather than being embedded into already developed technology. It was a separate app or link that, if we wanted to engage with it, the chance was there. But investors do not want to wait on a return; they wanted developers to prove that the public will become accommodating to this new era of automation. In order to push AI and keep investment, AI had to transition from a product to an interface. AI made companies billions of dollars simply by being this new shiny thing that sci-fi authors once dreamed of.
Embedding intelligence was the only way to make it so deeply integrated that it is now unavoidable.
If AI is simply how technology works now, how do we get away from it?
AI Hangover
As an environmental science student, writer, and generally curious person, I would say my problem with AI is apparent. Data centers that support AI have massive rates of energy consumption. The power demand for training and running models of AI requires massive amounts of electricity that can strain power grids that could possibly even be using fossil fuels, depending on the location of the center. Data centers also require cooling systems since AI generates extreme heat. Freshwater is needed to cool towers and equipment, putting local communities at risk by depleting their water resources.
Beyond the environmental and energy effects of running AI, AI has set our world up to weaken curiosity. Not to dig or take time and come to a conclusion yourself.
In the past decade, the public has been receiving information from 15-second videos through Instagram and TikTok. More recently, a Google search is covered by AI overview, and emails are recapped for you to save time. Meta’s new Muse is a “Secure, private personal AI agent that proactively helps with people’s goals and suggest ideas.” Muse is a tool that will work for you even after you leave the app, sending emails or making a purchase. “It gets better results with less effort: selling a car for more, lowering a bill, adjusting a training plan as the rest of someone’s life shifts.”
Now, this article is not to influence you to go use Muse or influence you to stop using AI. In retrospect, AI is an incredible tool for explaining problems you are stuck on or for brainstorming with you. The problem is not that AI exists; the problem is that it is becoming increasingly difficult to get away from.
There is something so valuable about a common struggle and search for information. To come to conclusions on your own. When technology consistently removes the need to search, struggle, wonder, or figure things out, it can reduce the opportunity for curiosity. Not every search needs a summary; emails do not need to be recapped. Inconvenience does not need to be automated away.
Recently, I have been trying to avoid AI as much as I can. Something as simple as scrolling past the overview and trying my search “-AI” as a fellow writer recommended. Since Apple Intelligence came out in 2024, it has been turned off and on social media I uncheck the boxes that allow my information to train AI models.
I miss when AI was a tool we could choose to engage with. The world will continue to take AI by storm despite the many warnings and concerns surrounding it. AI will continue to grow and become more deeply embedded in our lives. I just want to live in a world where we still have the choice to use it or not.