I’d been working on a post about how it may be that AI has no benefit, or negligible enough to round off to zero. I wasn’t sure if I’d post it, but some recent statistics in Harper’s Index prompted me to. I’ll give some context, then the statistics, then the extreme views.

Context

Most people I’ve asked about AI who view it positively, by no means a representative sample, describe some use that they say helps them or would, like making slides for a presentation or write emails for them. They never mention people whose values they oppose using AI to help themselves.

To be blunt, consider an issue you feel strongly about—possibly abortion or human rights abuses. Now consider that people who oppose your views are using AI as much as you are.

The big picture: AI doesn’t only help you. It helps everyone, meaning it accelerates our current culture mostly in its current direction, advantaging those with greater access.

Recent Harper’s Index statistics on AI

Percentage change since last year in the portion of Americans aged fourteen to twenty-nine who feel excited about AI : –39

Who feel angry about it: +41

Percentage of Americans using AI in dating who have used it to analyze text messages for signs of romantic interest : 38

Who have used it to generate conversation starters : 51

Who have used it for conflict de-escalation : 43

Date on which Texas implemented a statewide cell-phone ban in public schools : June 20, 2025

Percentage increase in the number of books checked out in the Dallas Independent School District in the following school year : 25

AI May Not Improve Life In Any Way

[To write the following, I deliberately chose to adopt a one-sided view as an exercise to see where it went. I’m not saying it represents my views completely.]

AI is designed to engage people to use it more. In that sense it creates dependence. It’s designed to create craving and addiction, roughly speaking. Saying that it helps you achieve goals or other purposes is like saying that opiates create euphoria. Yes, they do, and it feels good, but how do they affect life overall?

AI gives the feeling of solving problems, but most of the work I hear of people using it for falls in the realm of: “If I don’t do it with AI, someone else will and I’ll lose, so I better do it first.”

Also, many of the problems we feel it solves resulted from AI or are mere busy work. For example, other people use AI to do their work, accelerating or augmenting their output, so you feel you have to in order to keep up—that is, to not lose your job, at least for uses related to your income. But what is the value of making slides faster? Nobody wakes up in the morning thinking, “I want to bring more slides into the world.” No child wants to grow up to make more slides.

Let’s move up to the bigger picture. Let’s say AI cures cancer. I don’t want to break the news to you, but we’ll all still die. We’ll all still suffer. We’ll all still see people we love die and suffer.

Meanwhile, AI increases loneliness, dependence, isolation, polarization, and fragility. It decreases self-awareness. It pollutes and depletes, sacrificing the quality of billions of lives to extend the lives of thousands by a year or two.

I’ve never heard anyone present a credible vision for a future with AI because there is none. It’s a solution in search of a problem. We create problems we say it solves as legitimizing myths for our dependence and loss of mental ability like intelligence, emotional regulation, and resilience. I’m not saying cancer isn’t a problem, but the problem isn’t really cells multiplying out of control or even that we’ll die. The problem is how we handle inevitable challenges and AI lowers our abilities to.

I acknowledge the knee-jerk response that it can help some people, like someone who for some reason can’t talk to humans but somehow will engage with AI. In other words, I’ll grant something like 0.00000000001% of its use cases.

Meanwhile, any result of a society improved by AI, if possible, will become obsolete within years, or rather months or weeks, and soon days. Remember when people tried to build businesses around helping people write AI prompts? How long did that idea last?

I think if people were pressed to provide a vision, they’d suggest a world with no cancer, living longer lives maybe forever, falling in love and never breaking up (not sure if with people or AI companions), never feeling physical or emotional pain.

This vision makes no sense when you think of it. We just feel an urge to use AI whose satisfaction, however temporary, gives a jolt that motivates using it again—that is, a greater urge or craving. Then we legitimize those urges and dependence by telling ourselves it improved our lives.

It’s based on misunderstanding how our minds and bodies developed and what creates enduring well-being. Complex systems like our minds and bodies need training to become resilient and strong, including stress that feels uncomfortable. AI does to our minds like the right image below of muscles that haven’t been trained.

The alternative is fragility, obesity, weakness, and collapse. If we achieve those things amid an accelerating economy and achievements we haven’t done, have we improved our lives?

I admit I haven’t addressed an underlying issue of the conditions that make us feel we have no choice but to use AI. Most people using it probably feel that way. I’m not trying to make people feel bad. At this stage, I’m just considering AI’s value, not what to do about it or how. My upcoming book addresses those issues.

Edit: Two relevant articles I didn’t look for but found the next morning

From The Atlantic, August 17, 2026, Even College Students Have Stopped Hanging Out:

If anyone were to be immune to America’s loneliness epidemic, it would be college students. For years, Americans have been going to fewer parties and spending more time alone. But college has historically been about socializing—or, let’s just say it, partying—as much as it has been about education. It’s where young people escape parental supervision, move in with roommates, and encounter thousands of potential new friends.

But the antisocial century has arrived on campus. Today’s students spend much less time socializing than past generations did. In 1994, 32 percent of college seniors spent more than six hours a week partying. By 2026, that was 21 percent, according to an analysis of survey data by UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute. The percentage who spend more than six hours a week socializing face-to-face with friends fell from 74 to 65 percent over the same period. Meanwhile, the share of first-year students who reported feeling frequently isolated from campus life has more than doubled in the past two decades. (These surveys are not nationally representative, but they line up with what professors, administrators, and students told me they have observed anecdotally.)

Nationally, college students report higher rates of loneliness than adults do. On the National Survey of Student Engagement, run out of Indiana University’s Center for Postsecondary Research, more students report having positive interactions with professors than with peers. A rising senior at MIT told me that, despite being involved in Greek life and athletics, he eats alone most days. “I feel like I’m somebody who seeks social interactions,” he said, yet “I would say I am alone at least four or five days a week.”

…

At USC, for example, Moore developed a course to teach students how to make friends, which MIT now uses.

Students at some of the world’s top rated universities don’t know how to make friends. Do you think AI will accelerate or reverse this trend?

From The New York Times, August 13, 2026, Should Letting Children Play Alone Outside Be a Crime?, which quotes podcast guest Peter Gray:

Mallerie Shirley knew something was wrong the second she saw her then-6-year-old son walk through the front door. It was November 2025, and he had just returned from riding his scooter to a playground about a quarter of a mile from their home in Atlanta, Ga.

Ms. Shirley remembers how he looked: shoulders slouched, eyes cast downward. She asked him what happened. He explained that a woman stopped him on his way home and demanded to know his age, why he was alone and where he lived. Scared, he ignored the woman and continued on his way.

Ms. Shirley and her husband, Christopher Pleasants, believed in instilling a sense of independence in their two children, and they had recently started to give their son opportunities to do things unaccompanied, like asking him to find items in the grocery store. Typically, after he explained to concerned adults that he had permission from his parents, people felt reassured.

But this woman’s concern felt more accusatory than empathetic. “I think she followed me in her car,” Ms. Shirley remembers her son telling her.

She didn’t think much of it until two days later, when a case manager from the Fulton County Division of Family and Children Services showed up at her house. Ms. Shirley was not home, but Mr. Pleasants was. The case manager explained that a complaint had been filed, and that she would need to inspect their home and interview their son at school.

…

In late December, the agency notified Ms. Shirley and Mr. Pleasants that the complaint against them of child abuse and neglect had been substantiated. The couple hired a lawyer and filed an appeal.

…

Brittany Patterson, a mother of four, was arrested and charged with misdemeanor reckless conduct for allowing her 10-year-old son to walk alone to a nearby dollar store. When deputies from the Fannin County Sheriff’s Office came to her house and handcuffed her, “I was livid,” she said. She added that her arrest, and the subsequent media attention, were more traumatizing to her children than anything that had ever happened to them while they were unsupervised. The charges were eventually dropped.