AI and Society.

AI won't replace you. A person using AI might.

The nuanced truth about AI and employment: AI doesn't eliminate jobs wholesale — it transforms them. The tasks within a job change. Some tasks become automated. New tasks emerge. The people who adapt fastest gain the most.

History shows this pattern with every major technology shift. ATMs didn't eliminate bank tellers — they changed what tellers do. Spreadsheets didn't eliminate accountants — they made accountants more powerful.

The risk isn't AI itself. It's the speed of the transition and whether society supports the people who need to adapt. If your response to AI is "it's coming for my job," the better response is: "how do I become the person who uses it best?"

(You're already doing that by taking this course.)

The digital divide is becoming an AI divide.

The best AI tools cost money. The best AI education costs money. The infrastructure to run AI (fast internet, modern devices) costs money. This means AI's benefits are disproportionately flowing to people and organizations that already have resources.

This matters because AI is becoming a productivity multiplier. If some people get a 5x productivity boost and others don't, existing inequalities widen — fast.

The environmental cost nobody talks about.

Training a large AI model can consume as much energy as hundreds of homes use in a year. Running AI inference — every time you send a prompt — requires servers that consume electricity and water for cooling.

This doesn't mean you shouldn't use AI. It means you should be mindful:

• Don't run the same prompt 50 times to get slightly different outputs when the first one was fine.
• Use the right-sized model for the task. Simple questions don't need the most powerful model.
• Support companies investing in sustainable AI infrastructure.
• Recognize that AI's environmental cost is real but so is its potential to solve environmental problems.