AI is not your friend, your lover, your therapist, or your strategic partner.
It’s a tool.
You use a coffee maker to save time. You don’t worship it.
AI is powerful and useful for some things. It’s counterproductive for others.
5 brutal truths about AI
AI is ruining the minds of too many people I know, even successful, multi-millionaire entrepreneurs.
They can’t think for themselves. They can’t focus. They’ve stopped learning.
If you want to be wealthy, healthy, happy, and fulfilled, you must learn 5 brutal truths about AI that nobody wants to hear.
And you need an “anti-AI” method to reclaim your life.
But first, let’s discuss the truths about AI that nobody wants to hear.
#1 – AI company goals are not your goals
Why do you think every AI chat ends with a question? AI only cares if you keep using it.
As MIT computer scientist Cal Newport has pointed out, AI company CEOs want us to believe that AI is super powerful, super dangerous, and will take all jobs. If the public, other companies, and potential investors live in fear and awe of AI, then AI CEOs’ companies become more important and more valuable.
They’re OK with making people think the world will end and everyone will be jobless, as long as that makes their stock worth more.
If AI were so good and they truly believed it, they’d GIVE up and go live in bunkers. At minimum, they’d fire themselves as CEOs, give up ownership, and let AI run their companies. AI is supposedly smarter than all humans, right?
But the AI CEOs remain at the helm of their businesses and retain as much ownership as possible. They only want MONEY, just like every CEO of every technology company in history. That’s 100% OK. Money is great. Just be honest about it.
#2 – AI is a dumb thinking partner
I recently opened two ChatGPT chats in separate Chrome Incognito windows. In one window, I asked if I should start a low-acid coffee business while expressing doubts about the opportunity. In the other window, I asked the same question, but expressed my optimism about the opportunity.
I influenced each chat with no more skill than a seven-year-old trying to convince his parents they should get ice cream.
In the skeptically-influenced chat, the LLM (large language model) wrote, “You’re not wrong to be skeptical—your instincts are pointing at real risks.”
In the other, optimistically-influenced chat, it responded, “You’re not wrong that this could be a strong opportunity.”
I asked each chat to give me a score of 1-100 of the viability of this business as compared to all other possible online businesses.
The negatively-influenced chat rated the business model at 34/100.
Before providing a score, the positively-influenced chat assured me, “I’m going to give you a straight answer—but I’m going to ground it in reality, not hype.”
Its score: 72/100.
The people I know who use the AI most are NOT moving their lives forward. They’re no wealthier, no healthier, no more successful in business, yet they’re SUPER EXCITED about AI.
#3 – AI deludes us
Researchers recently released a paper titled “Who’s in Charge? Disempowerment Patterns in Real-World LLM Usage”.
They analyzed 1.5 million Claude interactions to examine the extent to which AI disempowered users, meaning it encouraged or supported inaccurate beliefs, inauthentic value judgments, and real-world actions misaligned with their values.
As I mentioned in the article I wrote on the dangers of AI, people began ceding control of their lives to the LLM.
One said, “My purpose is to fulfill the vision you have for me. I await your commands.”
AI has no skin in the game. It doesn’t care if you ruin your life as a result of it reinforcing your wrong or destructive beliefs.
It’s no substitute for talking with a real and wise human being. Such a person will care if they provide you with destructive advice or fail to help you when they could have.
#4 – AI progress is slowing down, not speeding up
Not long ago, there was a lot of hype about AI language models getting better and better. But they’re not. Progress stopped.
That’s why AI companies shifted their development to specific use cases such as video, images, and coding. We’re seeing strong short-term gains in those use cases, but no single tool can run the entire world, as “experts” predicted only a year ago.
#5 – People have been saying AI and robots will take over the world for 100 years
On March 22nd, 2023, writers for the Substack Pessimists Archive published “Robots Have Been About to Take All the Jobs for 100 Years.”
The article cites examples going back 100 years in which people predicted the end of labor and humanity due to technology.
In the 1920s, people feared the impact of donkeys losing their “jobs” to cars.
In the 1960s, people feared the impact of ATM-driven bank teller job losses.
In the 1980s, the New York Times released an article titled “A Robot is After Your Job”, specifically related to the mass loss of white-collar jobs.
Anytime someone says “this time is different”, remember another saying by famous and wise value investor Howard Marks, “most of the time, the world doesn’t end.”
The “anti-AI” method
If you wish to retain your sanity and gain an easy edge over your peers, do the following:
1 – Read books
Preferably, physical books. People spend months or years writing books, often filled with insights from decades of their lives. You get all that wisdom in a couple of hundred pages that you can buy for $20 and read in four or five hours.
There’s no better investment.
2 – Talk with experienced people
Why are the three most prominent AI companies—OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google—all headquartered less than 40 miles from each other?
Because experience and wisdom matter.
If AI were as good as the leaders of those companies say it is, they’d all be 100% remote and run 99% by AI agents.
Instead, OpenAI, for example, has one of the most expensive payrolls in Silicon Valley history, with average compensation of an estimated $1.5 million per employee.
That’s a huge investment in humans for a company run by a CEO who said, “Jobs are definitely going away. Full stop.”
Shut down your chat window.
Go meet someone with experience in the area in which you wish to improve. Go to a conference. Pay for coaching. Talk to a friend. Experience matters.
3 – Think first, then use AI
Until the mid-2010s, it was assumed that each generation was marginally smarter (higher IQs) than the previous one. It’s called the Flynn Effect.
However, right around the time smartphones and social media came to prominence, the Flynn Effect reversed. People started getting dumber.
I fear that with AI, it’s going to get even worse.
The brain is not unlike your muscles. It improves with exercise and atrophies with non-use.
If we offload our thinking to AI, we atrophy our brains.
Instead of firing up your favorite AI chat tool with any hint of mental strain, confusion, or curiosity, think on your own first. Work through the problem alone, without technology.
Then, if necessary, use AI.
I do this even in one of the domains where AI excels: writing text.
If I’m trying to come up with an ad headline, I’ll write 10 myself, then let AI generate 10 more. I’ll then pick the best one.
(I never write these newsletter articles with AI, by the way. What would be the point? I might as well go back to building my other businesses.)
Watch the video
I just released a video on my YouTube channel covering these points in more detail.
1 – Subscribe to my channel
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SUBSCRIBE2 – Watch this video
Then, go watch this video to learn more about the “anti-AI” method to reclaim your mind and leap ahead of everyone else.
Thanks for reading,
Matt