This is snake-handling 101. The snake-handlers believe snakes can be deadly. But they also need you to be in awe of their faithful handling, to confer authority upon them as the special, spiritually gifted guarantors of Snake Safety/Governance. Fear, fascination, and protection reinforce each other.

smartest guys in the room amirite

That’s the most embarrassing shit I’ve ever heard

case in point

Your kid understands us better than we understand ourselves

Also, it could turn out that the studies so far are all wrong, and AI is generally great for the mind! A real boon to learning, imagination and cognitive growth. But I would have expected some clear scientific evidence of this by now. That being said...

Yeah I had missed that from Doctorow; the structural analogy works too! (and indeed overlaps at the ‘its in the walls’ point above)

OK, last point, because I have a job to do that is not Internet. There is one place where the analogy really breaks down. In the US, when the true cost of asbestos became clear, we didn't ask the manufacturers to save us. We didn't invite them to summits. We sued them into oblivion. fin. 22/22

Many now notice people they know starting to sound--in person--like chatbots, speaking and reasoning in AI's stiffened tropes. I warned in The AI Mirror against becoming entranced and captivated by these mirror reflections of our aggregated minds. Worse is if we also begin to resemble them. 21/n

Even when their outputs are weird or disturbing, they can be oddly homogenous (see the freaky AI-generated food photos/ads used by local restaurants). I just read an AI-written manuscript that had consistently beautiful prose. By the end it felt like listening to one song on repeat for a week. 20/n

And while asbestos stiffens the lungs physically, we have reason to worry that GenAI might stiffen our minds intellectually, creatively and morally. AI-generated outputs are, for the most part, variations on the dominant mathematical pattern in the training corpus that is linked to your input. 19/n

With GenAI, we roll our eyes and say 'it's fine, just don't let AI do your thinking for you!' Yet there's no evidence for what that amounts to, and studies on cognitive surrender (Shaw and Nave 2026) make that prophylactic look shaky as hell. You don't always notice when it's thinking for you. 18/n

In the early days of asbestos mitigation, and still in places like Russia today, people were/are told they'll be fine if they just 'use it correctly.' (sound familiar?) "Just don't breathe in clouds of it! Wear a paper mask!" Oops, sorry, doesn't work, now it's in your lungs. 17/n

Again, this may be reversible! But it's a hell of a gamble, and frankly an inexcusable one, that we are making our kids think with it *before we know* how severe is the harm to their cognitive flexibility and motivation, or how to reverse its harmful effects. Nor do we know how to prevent harm. 16/n

Fifth: asbestos harms the lungs by stiffening them, making them harder to expand. Eventually it just requires too much physical effort to breathe. We don't yet know exactly how GenAI affects the mind, but early studies suggest it increases the perceived mental effort of thinking without it. 15/n

Likewise, working people like my grandfather, who died from asbestos exposure at work, didn't have a choice about whether to be harmed by it. Many people don't feel they have the power to say 'no' to using GenAI at work or to avoid it for schoolwork, if the cost is being seen as 'unproductive.' 14/n

Likewise, some elite private schools and universities are already testing 'AI-free' models of education for the wealthy (including children of AI developers!) while cash-strapped public schools go all-in for AI to deliver 'efficiencies' (reduce headcount). Same dynamics in media, health, etc. 13/n

Fourth, the cost of getting GenAI out of the walls will disproportionately harm those with the least resources & power to do so. It was only the wealthiest countries in the world--including those that first mined and marketed asbestos insulation--that stopped using it and paid for remediation. 12/n

Third, because it's in the walls, so to speak, it's hard to avoid. You often don't know when you're in a house that still has asbestos. It's also increasingly hard to see where GenAI is present in our collective cognitive endeavours. I know I'm not using it, but anyone I write with might be. 11/n

Second, and most obviously, by the time we realized the severity of asbestos' harms, it was already in all the walls. The comparison with GenAI is obvious. It's already in the walls -- of our schools, our governments, our media, our courts -- before we have measured the severity of its harms 10/n