Perhaps Alec Watson said it best when he described the phenomenon of an ‘offloading of thought’. In the name of convenience, it would appear we are collectively more than willing to give up our agency, privacy, and dignity. What am I talking about?

Recently, a non-technical friend of mine attempting to fix issues with their internet, spent $200 on a number of products an AI assured them would do just that. Spoiler alert: they did not (but that is besides the point)

Later on that same day, I overheard someone discussing vacation destinations, and declare they would ‘just ask AI’ where to go.

These are all seemingly innocent use cases - after all, the same questions have been answered by technology (specifically by Google Search) for years, albeit a little bit less efficiently. However, hearing this rhetoric today has me incredibly concerned.

If AI fulfills roughly the same purpose that a Google Search once did, why is it’s rapidly increasing ubiquity so disquieting? The answer, as far as I see it, is the two are fundamentally different. While yes, pure Google Search is still an algorithm, (and AI at that - no, not generative AI, sturdy old-machine learning) and one whose incentivisation structure runs counter to the unadulterated pursuit of knowledge, it still is nothing more than just an aggregator.

That is the key: One still needed to click through the results, to rely on individual, independent websites for the actual information. While Google (or any search provider) could control what results we did or did not see, they still lacked some power - they could not yet control the content. Out of necessity, we still had the privilege of interpreting information on our own. However, today, when we turn to AI to answer those same questions, we are allowing a corporation to think for us. The result of this increasing reliance? Google, Microsoft, OpenAI (same thing), [insert corporation here], have achieved total dominion over the information we see.

That is what is so concerning about this trend: rather than researching, considering a variety of sources, and coming to our own conclusions, we are being outright told what to think. And we are all complacent in this - because it’s so convenient.

Seemingly never before have so few corporations had such control over how we perceive the world. To those saying this has always been the case, maybe even pointing to the past, before internet when information was consumed in print and dictated by a handful of media conglomerates, my response is only this: past generations need not engage with that content. They had a choice about what newspaper to read, if at all. Today however, we take away our own choice by conditioning ourselves to instantly turn to AI whenever we have the slightest curiosity.

And who can blame us? AI is the ‘hot new buzzword’ that has got companies and investors pushing it in every product. The news is being summarised by AI , our communications are being both penned and digested by AI , our phone calls, our calendars, our photos - all of our intake of information about the real world is, for the most part, being consolidated and controlled by these companies. I am not claiming that Meta, nor Google, nor OpenAI, are using this control to subtly influence you (yet), however the possibility, the capacity for them to do exactly that, is terrifying.

I think that should startle all of us. Among the myriad of reasons not to use (generative) AI, each of which warrant their own discussions, from it’s outsized environmental impact, to it’s theft of intellectual property, or it being used to justify invasive data collection, how it is destroying academia and how we do not truly learn when using AI , I urge you to avoid it at all costs, at least for this reason.

And, to be clear, my issue here is not with the technology itself. I do find generative AI to be revolutionary in it’s capacity to produce comprehensible output from natural language input. I do not doubt that it is the future, whether I like it or not. My issue is with the trend forming around it. With how normalised ‘offloading thought’ is becoming, and how much every company is shoehorning unwanted AI integrations into their products to please shareholders. Most of all, I am worried about our willingness as a society to accept all of this. Make no mistake: this tendency is not limited to just generative AI.

“Electrical Engineering, particularly at MIT, was the hardest major, so I said, ‘You know, how about we try and see how it goes.’“ Those are the words of Lisa Tzwu-Fang Su (蘇姿丰), an engineer who has indeed earned her Bachelor of Science, Master of Science, and PhD in Electrical Engineering - all from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, just as she said she would. After receiving her doctorate, Taiwan born Dr. Lisa Su did brief stints at IBM and Texas Instruments before joining and later becoming the CEO of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), a company which designs computer hardware. The tech industry she would join however, with 92% of its leaders being men, was (and is) hostile to women. The industry was not looking to let that change, with Dr. Su earning a starting salary $150,000 less than her male predecessor in the exact same position. Nonetheless, she stepped into the role despite mentors in her life urging her not to , and got to work.

Indeed it was a great achievement, save for the fact that in 2014, as she became CEO, AMD was failing - big time. The company’s primary product, it’s central processing units (CPU's) were terrible: they were slower, ran hotter and were more expensive than competitor Intel’s comparable products. In true Dr. Su fashion, she had chosen the most difficult possible time to take the reigns. At that point, shares of the publicly traded company were sat around the $2 mark. In just about five years however, under her leadership that skyrocketed to $110 per share, and AMD's market share doubled. How did she do it? For one, she intelligently managed the company, cutting deals with Microsoft and Chinese manufacturers to keep it afloat, buying time while she worked to redesign the company’s entire product line from the ground up. Saying, “People are really motivated by ambitious goals” she set a lofty, near impossible goal to make their products 40% faster. Two years later, AMD beat that, and exploded back into the scene. In a male dominated field, where women are seen as inferior, despite taking over a sinking ship, despite earning significantly less than her male predecessor, Dr. Lisa Su defied the entire industry and succeeded. Today, AMD processors power the latest Xbox's , AMD outsold Intel in datacentres for the first time in history, and Dr. Su’s incredible success story is taught as a case study at Harvard Business School. She has been selected as Time Magazine’s 2024 CEO of the year - the first women ever to receive such a nomination, and is one of thirty women on the S&P 500.

Behind all of the accolades though, the three degrees, and the multi-national technology companies, one thing is clear: Dr. Lisa Su worked hard and fought for every last thing she has ever earned. From learning to multiply at the age of seven, to becoming the highest paid CEO in the S&P 500 , Dr. Su’s story is one of intelligent risk taking, tireless determination, and a relentless drive to outperform every expectation. And that, is what makes her my personal hero.