Why AI Might Spell Doom For The Lazy and Mediocre

Couple of years back, a student asked me in the class — “Sir, why study when everything is available on Google?”

I said, “Why don’t you search on Google how to build another Search Engine as good as them? I am sure you will find something!”

He fell silent, not because he got his answer, but probably because he didn’t understand the monstrous profoundness of my words. So I had to take a simpler route. I said, “Buddy, you over-estimate the power of Google. It knows nothing. It’s only extremely good at searching what people like you and me choose to upload.” The student seemed to survive that line. So I continued with some exaggeration (it’s risky, but when you are a prof, you do it anyway). I said, “When you know nothing, you can’t even search. When you know something, you search to know more. And when you know very well, you are searched for.”

The class nodded in temporary appreciation. However, I knew this lesson would soon be forgotten and most assignments would be promptly copied from the Internet, sometimes run through free software tools to fool the official plagiarism-checkers. And student assignments would degenerate to a race between computers rather than humans. Reason why some of my colleagues insist that the explosive combination of Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V is probably the worst invention since the atom bomb, and few have even started insisting on taking hand-written assignments.

I often fear an increasingly scary reality. Where does this tremendous influence of computers and codes on our lives take us?

Are you tech-savvy, I ask my students. All hands go up. Why, I ask. Oh, because we use a smartphone all the time! Does the use of smartphone or a bunch of tech products make you tech-savvy? Or they really make you tech-agnostic? Tech-fools?

The reality sadly is the better and more competent the technology, the lesser is the need be smart!

Remember how our grandparents (or even parents) never understood a desktop computer? It had many moving parts — a keyboard, a mouse, installers and exe files that came on CD/DVDs, a UPS, multiple wires, cryptic BIOS options, registry entries, Control Panel, drivers, too many…

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