Despite its ever-widening impact and even greater promise, artificial intelligence has the potential to torpedo careers.
That’s the message from JetZero CEO Tom O’Leary who recently warned Elon University students about the consequences of relying too much on AI, which can be inaccurate.
“You can get really dumb really fast, and some of you will,” O’Leary told about 175 students and others at Elon’s Martha & Spencer Love School of Business. “I have no doubt about that. That’s the hard part about life.”
To illustrate the sobering point, O’Leary recalled an exchange with another Elon — Tesla Motors co-founder Elon Musk — nearly 20 years ago. Leading up to the launch of Tesla’s first electric car, O’Leary worked as the automaker’s director of sales marketing.
Musk pulled the door behind him after entering O’Leary’s office. “He’s pulling his hair out” talking about his pending divorce, O’Leary said. He split with Justine Wilson Musk in 2008.
“I wanted to be there for him, but I’m not a kiss-ass type of person,” O’Leary recalled. “I said, ‘Hey, it’s got to be really tough to be you from the perspective of how do you know who’s telling you the truth and who’s just telling you what they think that you want to hear?’”
Musk left without replying, according to O’Leary. What he told Musk stuck with him and today illustrates the two sides of AI.
“It’s like how dependent are you going to be on it, and at what point do you know if you’re being told the truth?” he said. “I don’t know.”
As a student at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina, O’Leary relied upon technology known as microfiche to conduct research. Almost unthinkably cumbersome compared with AI, he described the eye-straining task of reading newspaper articles, printed in miniature on a piece of film. To read the words requiring putting film on a tray underneath a lighted, magnifying viewer.
“You would slide the tray, almost like an Ouija board, until you found the article,” O’Leary said. “Then you’d take the notes. You’d literally have to scribe the quote that you were looking for.”
By contrast, the CEO told the students, “You all just reach for your phone” and tell AI language models such as Claude to “tell me the answer to this question and cite it and actually write me an eight-page paper about this topic.”
O’Leary cited research that exposure to “massive screen time” before the age of 10 can destroy gray matter in the brain or stunt its growth.
“They literally have less brain capacity,” he said, “and that will be some of you all in this room. But there’s going to be another cohort in this room — and hopefully it’s the vast majority of people in this room — who are going to be smarter than us because you have that access to all of the world’s information. And the trick becomes, then, what do you trust?”
