1 "We may all have AI superpowers by 2030"

Will we have to wear the stupid rave glasses?

2 The thing that occurs to me over and over with respect to this AI saga is that there is a class of people pushing other people to outsource their brains. I hear this or that about using generative AI in education, and I keep thinking: "But fundamentally, the whole *point* of education is to *internalize* skills. Not externalize them." Here we see these dorks trying to tempt us with externalizing actually knowing who you even work with on a day to day basis. I have great difficulty with names myself, but that's not something I want to outsource, much less pay a subscription fee for!
The future we're being sold is one where we need to pay some megacorporation a subscription fee to perform basic mental functions that someone less stunted by growing up with this technology 'intermediating' things for them would be able to do on their own. A profoundly disempowering vision, not 'superpowers' at all. My 'powers' are things I don't depend on someone else to provide! Things I don't need permission and approval to use how *I* see fit.
Anyway, I sort of can see mankind bifurcating into 'zombies' and 'mentats' over how computers are used.
The zombies: Use computers to do their thinking *for* them, to externalize their skills. The mentats: Use computers to train their ability to think, to internalize skills and develop abilities.
Also: Ye Gods, how thouroughly the promise of the personal computer revolution has been betrayed.

3 Related, I suppose, to my earlier observation that these people seem very frightened of thinking in general, and of the idea of it being done by someone other than themselves. (They and their AIs vs. independent minds and someone else's AIs.) They seem desperate to get everyone else to stop thinking entirely.

4 Hi, Jerry!

5 It is a bimodal culture driven by incompatible religious practices. Trad religion, while admitting magic and wonder, treats a lot of things as rationally knowable, and has praying for help as a standard internal practice. Communism is leadership magic and consensus magic. Memorizing a bunch of separate positions that are not weighed or evaluated against each other is a different style of resulting 'thought'. Individual internal evaluation has a random distribution of results, which violates the consensus magic, and violates conforming to the vision of the leader or the inner party. They also fear that the wishcasting will fail, and fear that the leadership will cut them out of the herd for torment.