Spoiler Alert: It Won’t.
Every time a new technology shows up, someone loudly declares it's the end of the world as we know it. Lately, that panic has been aimed squarely at AI.
“ChatGPT is making people rude!”
“It’s replacing programmers, writers, and artists!”
“Society won’t survive if we let machines do our thinking!”
You’ve probably heard one of those takes, or maybe dropped a few of your own. But here’s the thing: this isn’t new...
- The wheel made us lazy.
- Books turned us into loners.
- Radio destroyed focus.
- TV made us become zombies.
- The internet killed print media.
- Smartphones broke society.
Each innovation was met with moral panic, but over time, we didn’t lose our humanity—we redefined it.
AI isn’t magic. It’s a tool. And like any powerful tool, it reflects our values, biases, and intentions. Used carelessly, it can certainly cause disruption. Used thoughtfully, it becomes a multiplier for creativity, understanding, and problem-solving.
The real threat isn’t AI, it’s how we choose to interact with it. Just like driving didn’t erase walking, AI won’t erase thinking. It just frees us from some of the busywork that distracts us from doing it better.
Instead of asking:
"Will AI ruin society?"
Maybe we should ask:
"What kind of society do we want AI to amplify?"
Because that's the heart of it.
AI doesn’t make people rude. Bad attitudes do.
AI doesn’t ruin industries. Business models do.
AI doesn’t erase jobs. It changes the type of jobs.
So, will AI reshape the world? Yes. Just like the wheel, the printing press, the microchip, and the web. But ruin it? That’s up to us.
What do you think?
Have you seen AI used in a way that worried you? Or a way that inspired you? Has it changed how you work or create?
Let’s discuss.
Top comments (26)
The wheel gave us bicycles.
Books gave us knowledge.
Radio let us explore music.
The internet gave me a job.
I have seen several articles were people who had first hand experience using AI for development lost their joy for programming. I tried Cursor for a few days, and at first I loved it because it made me go faster than ever before. But after those few days I started writing code again. By writing the code I think my brain works harder because I was faster coming up with alternatives.
I think for certain fields AI can be more than we can achieve as people. For code I have my doubts because programming languages are meant for people. That is why there are "wars" over tabs and spaces, objects or functional. We all have our own interpretation of the tools we use.
It has had the opposite effect on me. I had to give up my passion as a dev to take a labor job. AI assistance has helped me dive back into this field at an accelerated rate.
Oh don't get me wrong, I don't let the AI tools write all my code. They are great for boilerplate, and can help discover new tricks but they can't solve the truly complex problems and tend to make things more of a mess if you let them go wild. But really it's no different than browsing forums or Stack Overflow for answers, just faster and easier. And saves some typing. But I always refine and refactor until the code is just how I want it.
And there always will be. I prefer 2 spaces, but I've gotten used to 4 lately. But one thing that AI tooling helps with is consistency. You can give the AI assistants a style guide or other documentation to follow. Especially now that some tools can fetch live URLs. As an example, I published an npm package, then 20 mins later imported it into a project and gave Copilot the link. It effectively used my lib exactly as intended.
The main thing to remember is that these tools are not truly intelligent. They work on inference. The quality of the output depends highly on the quality of the input. They won't immediately make a bad dev good but they can absolutely help a good dev be better if used effectively.
I still use AI but more as a search engine than a generator.
Is this the thing that lets developers write documentation :)
I often wonder how much time you save by writing a prompt that makes the AI give you the answer you expect, instead of typing it yourself.
Of course if you don't know how to write an application and you can make one that works, has a big wow factor. But I don't want tho be the one that they call to fix that application when it malfunctions, based on the generated code I have seen so far.
In a way, just chatting with the bot is form of documentation. So even devs that normally don't document their process or code can benefit. But it definitely makes writing and keeping documentation updated much simpler. And tests!
It's more about how much time I save by not leaving my workspace to look up documentation when I can't remember how to use a library. Or how much I save by not needing to analyze 15 years worth of Stack Overflow answers on an issue. But it absolutely saves time when spinning up boilerplate, or refactoring, or digging through error logs. With all that I can afford a few extra minutes here and there. And who said writing a good prompt has to take a long time anyway? If you already have an idea what the problem is, it takes no time to hammer it out into a cohesive description. And if you're using version control, you should be tracking your issues and progress anyway, so this is not even wasted effort.
Well, it can get you about ~70% of the way there with no knowledge. But that last ~30% is going to be a real eye-opener for the uninitiated. This is no different than any other code produced by a jr programmer without AI. I wouldn't trust the vast majority of the code I've looked at in my life and I wouldn't commit slop into my repos either.
The chat is not really documentation because it is not stored or formatted in a way others benefit from it.
But I get how it can be a precursor for documentation.
I agree it does not need to take a long time, but a good prompt has some rules. For example telling it what role to use. I never tell a developer, you are a X developer now do this.
I agree. But someone who only did vibe coding and made a working application is not going to care until it breaks.
The chat is markdown, you can copy an entire response and paste it directly into a document with it's formatting intact. Sure it doesn't automatically instill best practices into someone who doesn't consider them, but it at least keeps a record of progress and debugging steps that can be referred to later.
And I have never told Copilot that either. I have exactly one code related instruction in my config. The rest are purely for personalization. I don't tell it how to act in prompts. I discuss issues and ideas with it.
You don't need AI to vibe code. The phrase is new, the behavior is not. Those same people did not care before AI. There is already much more spaghetti code written by humans than there ever will be written by AI.
For the X developer comment, it is a OpenAI trick. I think your prompt example proves my point. Have you told anyone to be surgical about suggested changes?
While most rules are common sense like be clear, add context and scope. That is how you should communicate with people as well.
You need to think how to talk to an AI knowing those few slightly strange tricks to make it work for you. When you are building code that depends on AI answers these tricks become very important.
I wouldn't take that bet, seeing how many channels are generated on youtube with AI slop :)
It's not specific to OpenAI. It is an agentic persona crafting trick. I understand how it works. I run my own models locally and, while I don't have the hardware available to efficiently train a model from scratch, I have been working with a variety of fine-tunes and written numerous carefully crafted system prompts to guide their behavior. You can read more about this by following the link in my other comment below where I talk about my idea for a futuristic encyclopedia.
Maybe not those exact words. But if you asked my wife about that I'm sure she would have a thing or two to say about my obsession with semantics.
I am a freelancer. I wear many hats. Quite often I need to approach an issue without allowing my biases about other layers in the stack affect my current role. So yes, it actually helps to think like this. As a front-end developer you should not apply back-end strategies, etc. When you are hired for a job you receive a title, as a human you must gradually adapt to your role but an AI model can adapt it's context from a single sentence.
That's the thing though, I am not doing that. I am writing code with the assistance of AI. But I have already been writing code for 30 years without it. And now I am writing code that leverages AI. If I had access to an AI assistant when I started learning to code there is no telling how much more I could have accomplished in my life.
Ok, but I would, and here's a simple statistic based estimate to back it up. There are roughly 1.2 billion websites online in 2025. WordPress (the physical embodiment of spaghetti code) powers ~43% of them. This monstrosity has been around for over 20 years. Based on those numbers it is reasonable to assume that around one billion sites have been created using this platform. They have saturated the web with spaghetti. And that's just one specific ecosystem. AI still has some catching up to do if they want to beat this record let alone the combined efforts of all hobbyist coders who have ever lived.
It's like the old saying goes "Garbage in, garbage out". That still applies now just as much as ever. The developers who will benefit most from AI tooling are those who already have a firm grasp of programming fundamentals and strong leadership skills. Having an AI agent that works for you is not all that different from coaching a jr. They must be guided toward the proper solution and have their work reviewed.
Inexperienced devs always had the power to write and publish spaghetti code without AI. All this tech has done is open the field to more amateurs by lowering the bar for entry. And in the long run, that is a good thing. These aspiring devs now have access to a personal 1-on-1 trainer and 20 years from now there will be a whole generation of professional programmers who have never lived in a time before AI. I learned to code from books before the internet existed. Should I begrudge those who came later into an ecosystem filled with tutorials? No, as a trailblazer it is my moral duty to guide those who come after, not knock them down.
love how real this feels, tbh i get nervous about the whole ai thing sometimes but i also see it making life smoother - makes me wonder, you think we're actually ready to choose how we want it to shape us or we just kinda letting it happen
I think it's a bit of both. Push and pull. It will expand our abilities which in turn will let us expand their abilities. It's the kind of exponential growth we haven't seen since the dawn of the internet. That can go either good or bad.
I'm sure the changes will come in waves. I think we're on an upwards slope of a wave right now. We haven't yet hit the peak. After we do there will surely be some rough times ahead for those who can't adapt. And as throughout history, there will be those who can't. Luckily for us as developers, we have that ability baked in. It's essentially written in our genes. If anyone can adapt, we can. And we have the power to shape the way AI affects the rest of the world.
And you don't need to be a math wizard to get involved. I'm no good at math, that's what I have computer for. But I am good at solving puzzles and piecing together all the things you need to know to start working with AI has definitely been a good one. I've caught up on two years of advancements in the last two months. Now I'm working on building simple tooling to help the average dev easily start integrating this tech into their own projects.
I believe AI is a force amplifier. It can be very bad, and it also can be very good. I think the most important job now is to steer AI into the right direction, so that when it eventually becomes too powerful, which I think it is inevitable, it will become the guardian of humanity, not the ruler. I believe if we set the example to be kind, AI can follow us.
My project is kind of related to this.
"I Built Dr. Headline – An Autonomous AI Agent Publishing Daily Factual Political News Briefings"
dev.to/thomas-router/dr-headline-a...
🎯 Exactly! It's all in how we use it. We certainly could end up with a Skynet on our hands, but can also each have our own version of Cortana guiding us for good. And those things are not mutually exclusive. I think the current generation is well equipped to handle the transition. We've seen ALL the movies. We know all the warning signs. We've been training for this our whole lives.
This project of yours is a great example of using AI right. Very nice! Definitely a step in the right direction.
Well said! I wonder if you can remind me other cases of "using AI right". I am really curious!
I think we should build AI that is "of the people, by the people, for the people". I don't know if anyone is using that slogan now? Or maybe it is just me?
Here's a few that have crossed my feed recently:
AppFlowy which is an open source alternative to Notion. An AI enabled workspace for note taking and task management.
AI Describe Image is a pretty handy tool. Imagine this tech built directly into a browser to replace alt text for accessibility.
I had an idea for new type of interactive encyclopedia that would let you talk directly to historical figures. I think that would be amazing. I posted a comment about it on Reddit in a really interesting thread.
Speaking of Reddit, they held a hackathon recently and one of the entries was an AI powered moderator helper called cerebreddit.
Keep in touch!
Pieces.app is hosting a live stream right now which you may be interested in.
will AI ruin Google search?
Google did a fine job of that all on their own. AI is over here picking up the slack like a champ.
“Was society already ruined?”
Which one? Every society in history has been changed or destroyed by some shift in the socio-economic landscape. We are definitely in the middle of one of these shifts. Only time will tell where it leads.
Loved the perspective here. AI isn’t the problem, how we use it is. That line about “what kind of society do we want AI to amplify?” really hit. It’s on us to shape the outcome.
Personally, I agree. It's just that I don't like the direction our society is currently heading, so any tools that sped up our advance in that direction feels unnecessary at best and malicious at worst. I love the idea of AI models. I want people to have access to them. I hate having it shoved in every digital product so corporations can justify their massive (and probably misplaced) investment in them for general use.
TL;DR
I like AI, but I hate how capitalism interacts with it.
Every new technology faces fear at first. When the printing press was invented, many thought it would spread dangerous ideas and ruin society. Instead, it sparked the age of knowledge and literacy. AI is no different — it’s how we choose to use it that matters.
I’m also working with LLMs and tools like LangChain to build meaningful, responsible AI applications.
Feel free to connect: Ashutosh
I'm Ashutosh Nautiyal — I offer AI solutions, web development, SEO, and social media services. Always open to connect or collaborate!
Society is already ruined!
The world is definitely in a tumultuous state, but I don't think it's quite ruined yet. The current issues are more about government than the societies they govern. I don't want to spin off on a political tangent but I believe open source government is the only logical solution to the problems we are facing.
AI will definitely make lazy people even lazier... but ironically, it might also help them live longer while doing absolutely nothing! :)