(I'm trying to go with a different approach, where I structure / edit / polish my posts less going forward. I think there's a certain point where being perfectionistic just restricts your output, while making you sound pretentious.)
I haven't talked much about AI, since I don't find it very interesting or useful, but a thought that has been in the back of my head is that to the extent that it is useful, it's more of a question of "negative" rather than "positive" applications.
Fundamentally, and despite trillions of dollars being thrown at it, it cannot create great art, introduce new scientific paradigms, or even really come up with interesting or insightful comments during a conversation (AI's speech sounds like a cross between an HR person and a used car salesman). It thus has no real positive contributions to make-- but I think can be used as a tool to reveal fakeness within the economy, as well as the broader society.
Namely if a certain sector is vulnerable to what amounts to an industrial-scale Slop Machine, it means there wasn't much real work being done in the first place. AI can be used as a detector, to test for and reveal the presence of bullshit and fake work: if it successfully replaces human labor in this or that area, it's because the humans were not doing much in the first place.
So the fact that AI is having extraordinary success within academia should not be taken as a sign of its genius, but rather as an indication of the deep structural flaws and decline of academic culture. The fact that they are incapable of distinguishing between hallucinated meaningless gibberish and real honest / insightful work, reveals how low standards have fallen.
In that sense, AI is like a species, and academia is the environment. Its exponential growth within the niche reveals that the environment positively selects for garbage, which it can produce at a much faster rate than any human can (notwithstanding the valiant efforts of academics in recent decades).
I say the same thing for everyday tasks: anything that you're doing which AI can do better, is not worth doing in the first place. Whatever it is can probably be consigned to meaningless / filler work, and cut out of your routine.
So for example, I've heard that AI is great at writing emails-- what we can infer is that, obviously, most emails are a waste of time, and ultimately meaningless, and so perfectly suited for a machine that can only generate meaningless slop.
Other insightful people have already noticed this, and it seems to be a general theme: instead of heading to a techno-dystopia, where the all-powerful machines subjugate humanity, what we're really headed for is a kind of absurdist Philip K Dick scenario, where the laughably incompetent machines break all kinds of things, and we all have to act like babysitters cleaning up after an immature, reckless, ADHD child.