AI is a Collective Disaster

It takes two incomes to buy a home, my kids can’t play on the street any more, and I never get invited to dinner parties. Each of these is an example of a collective action failure. Put simply, individuals optimising for their best outcome leads to a collective failure: life becomes worse for everybody because we each do what is best for us individually. To take the classic example, it’s safer (and cheaper) for all of us when cars aren’t two-tonne monstrosities. But you are individually safer if you’re in one. So we all start buying them, and then streets and roads become more dangerous for everybody. I made myself safer, at everybody’s expense. Widespread LLM use is going to be the next big example. Individual Benefit Writing, researching, coding, and otherwise working with AI is unambiguously a time-saver. I can create documents, presentations and code in a fraction of the time it used to take me. Sharpening my ideas and discovering new ones is quicker and easier than it ever has…