AI Asbestos
· 4 min read
Asbestos—a nifty mineral that’s just popping out of the desert ground—boasts amazing properties like electrical and thermal insulation. It was an exciting discovery at the time: abundant, cheap, and useful in thousands of construction materials, so we put it everywhere. But then we learned inhaling it causes lung cancer. Oops.
Remediating asbestos is expensive and time-consuming. The crux of the issue is you must remove it carefully. Disturbing the material makes it airborne and dangerous.
Today, the hasty application of LLMs across society feels like the next asbestos moment. LLM tools promise many benefits to our work and our lives, but as we find their long term adverse effects we’ll someday regret embedding them and relying upon them.