AI & Society - The Impact and Dangers

In an era where AI has the power to solve your homework in seconds, generate pictures of imaginary worlds, and most importantly make your life thousands of times easier, how can we not lose ourselves in this craze over efficiency.

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My Thoughts

Generative AI is a fantastic innovation that continually impresses me whenever I use its features. As someone who always strives to be naturally efficient and seeks the best possible outcome, I am especially drawn to tools that accelerate high-quality work. Whether I'm coding, preparing case presentations, debugging R or Python scripts, building financial models, or refining slide decks, I demand precision and clarity from myself and the tools I use. I move fast but deliberately searching for the cleanest logic and most succinct structure. Thus, AI naturally fits into my tool rotation. It helps me work at the level I expect of myself due to the qualities listed above and throughout my page.

Across my academic work, AI has become part of the way I aim for excellence. When I build scripts that need to pass assert checks and statements, find a cleaner way to send an email, or identify data errors, AI is my go-to tool. It allows me to push my ideas further, test scenarios faster, and challenge myself to raise the bar with every project. My instinct has always been to optimize, and AI equips me with the speed to do that across all of my interests - from consulting research to data science labs to anything my brain can imagine.

But with all things that sound this great, there are pivot points that matter when using AI. As impressive as it is, it isn't sustainable for people to rely on it for everything. There is a risk in letting a tool like this slowly replace the effort, curiosity, and discipline that, as younger students, we strived to enable. Growing up, my favorite movie was Wall-E due to its light-hearted humor and fantasy-like robotics. Now we're getting closer to living in a world like that every single day; however, humans weren't in charge of that world. Instead, they had become disabled. The idea of handing over so much responsibility to technology that you lose your own self-sufficiency scared me. It taught me early that even the most helpful tools can become harmful if you forget your duties as a human. Thinking and failing are just part of being human.

That lesson shapes the way I view AI today. A powerful tool that can unlock efficiency, creativity, and innovation, but only if humans remain in firm control of the boundaries. These types of boundaries should be set by educators and professionals who value the work they do independently and take pride in their craft. AI should enhance human judgment, not override it. Humans will play essential roles in directing and exercising judgment in the process of integrating AI into society in a way that doesn't erase us from the history books.