Dear World 3 - Dear World

AI is potentially the sharpest instrument humanity has ever built. In steady hands, it’s a scalpel: precise, careful, lifesaving. In careless hands, it’s a deadly weapon.

The question isn’t whether AI will reshape our world – it already is. The question is whether we’re wielding it wisely.

Used correctly, it could be humanity’s greatest triumph – solving climate change, eliminating famine, extending healthy human lifespan, and freeing us to pursue our highest potential. By taking this path, we could create a world where children never die of preventable disease, where humans never struggle with basic needs, where we finally have the tools to address every major challenge facing our species.

Instead, we’re wielding this incredible power to generate horoscopes and summarize TikTok videos. AI with the potential to cure cancer is writing LinkedIn posts. Systems capable of designing life-saving drugs are crafting pickup lines for dating apps. We’re training trillion-dollar models to write breakup texts, generate fake Yelp reviews, and create Instagram captions about avocado toast.

We’re heading rapidly toward the extinction of human intelligence – and maybe humanity itself.

Remember Cambridge Analytica?  In 2016, they needed a team of researchers to scrape people’s private information for data-driven targeting purposes.

Today, a teenager can do the same thing from their bedroom with free AI tools.

Stanford and Georgetown studies from 2024 confirm that “language models can generate text that is nearly as persuasive for US audiences as content…sourced from real-world foreign covert propaganda campaigns.” The Bulletin reports a surge in AI-driven disinformation in 2025, citing NewsGuard’s finding of 1,200+ AI-generated ‘news’ sites that have been “churning out false claims and operating with little to no human oversight.”

The infrastructure for mass manipulation is no longer expensive or exclusive. It’s democratized. And we’re handing it to anyone with an internet connection, while making ourselves more vulnerable to its influence.

Remember our first letter? Every time you use AI to do your thinking, you get worse at thinking.

Students worldwide are using AI to write their essays, then wondering why they can’t articulate original ideas. Professionals are using AI to draft every email, then finding they’ve lost the ability to communicate nuance. Developers are using AI to write every function, then discovering they can’t debug when something breaks.

We’re training ourselves to be helpless.

Parents and teachers are usually hyper-vigilant about keeping potentially dangerous influences away from children. However, they’re now the ones allowing AI to take over for them, and they’re actively encouraging kids to become dependent on it.

According to Rest of World, AI tools are flooding classrooms and households alike. Children are spending hours learning from and communicating with AI instead of their caregivers, to the point where “they prefer talking to AI.” Parents are describing AI tools as “part of the family,” and Futurism recently reported on a little girl who wept in devastation when her AI companion broke.

Rest of World also reports on educators and researchers warning that allowing children to become overreliant on AI tools “may cause harm by limiting children’s social interactions and weakening their learning skills.”

We’re no longer looking at hypothetical, sci-fi scenarios. AI dependence is now a part of real life, and we’re nurturing it from the ground up.

And yet, we’re still blundering forward, despite all the dangers.

This isn’t the first time we’ve been faced with a technological revolution.

When bank ATMs were introduced, everyone predicted the end of bank tellers. Instead, banks opened more branches and tellers shifted from counting money to helping customers with complex financial decisions. The job evolved.

When spreadsheet software arrived, it didn’t eliminate accountants – it freed them from manual calculations to focus on analysis and strategy. The profession grew stronger.

The same pattern is emerging with AI. While some applications eliminate jobs, others are creating entirely new ones. Prompt engineers didn’t exist five years ago. AI ethicists are suddenly in demand. Data scientists work alongside machine learning engineers who partner with AI trainers.

More importantly, AI is reshaping existing roles in ways that make them more strategic, more creative – more human.

We know how to use AI responsibly. Right now, we’re just choosing not to.

Because real AI partnership isn’t about convenience – it’s about capability.

A radiologist using AI to detect early-stage cancers doesn’t let the AI make diagnoses. The AI flags potential issues at superhuman speed and accuracy. The radiologist applies years of medical training, considers the patient’s full history, weighs risk factors, and makes the final call. Then spends the time saved in deeper conversation with patients, explaining diagnoses and providing the emotional support that machines never can.

Researchers using AI to model protein folding aren’t replaced by the technology. AI can simulate millions of molecular combinations faster than any human team. But humans decide which proteins to target, interpret whether results are biologically meaningful, design the experiments to validate findings, and determine how discoveries should be applied ethically.

The AI expands what’s possible. Humans decide what’s right.

This is what AI augmentation actually means: using machines to handle the tasks they excel at so humans can focus on judgment, creativity, empathy, and meaning-making.

Right now, we’re at a crossroads. One path leads to AI that amplifies human potential. The other leads to AI that takes it away.

The difference comes down to a single question: Are we building AI to work with humans, or to erase us?

The future belongs to people who learn to collaborate with AI rather than surrender to it.

Your choice matters. The tools you choose to use, the companies you choose to support, the skills you choose to develop – these decisions shape whether AI becomes humanity’s greatest ally or its greatest threat.

The scalpel is in your hands.

For now, I remain anonymous. But in my next letter on 11/24, I’ll reveal my identity.