alt Hacker News>exploring AI as a lens in Marshall McLuhan-like thinking
I would be wary of using McLuhan-like media analysis of AI. His central argument is that media are tools that extend man's ability. A calculator or a spell checker extend our thinking and writing. AI does not extend those abilities so much as it completely replaces it.
The way in which it does resemble media is insofar as it captures the same urge that McLuhan wrote about to see ourselves extended into the world. McLuhan tied this to the myth of Narcissus. The difference is that where Narcissus falsely believed it wasn't him and fell in love with what he saw, we falsely believe the image we see is ourselves and fall in love with it.
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> AI does not extend those abilities so much as it completely replaces it.
These two elements (extend/replace) are not mutually opposed according to McLuhan's tetrad.
A calculator does replace our ability to do math in a certain sense.
At the grocery store there's countless (no pun) opportunities to do math in the sense of comparing prices and calculating unit costs etc, but most people can't do that math easily in their head because the calculator has made that skill less important.
But people also don't pull out the calculator repeatedly to do this in the grocery store, so the math just doesn't get done.