The number of mistakes you can make is infinite in comparison to the number of correct choices you can make. Since you don't have infinite lives and time there must be some manner of problem space reduction to ensure you get anything done.
Luckily for us humans evolution has spend quadrillions of hours doing just that for us. Modern technology has made it so you don't spend your entire life trying to get something to eat every waking moment of the day. This leads to some problems of your ideology of hardships lead to growth. Which hardships? Which growth? Should you go back to living in a cave like a mammal to get the full experience?
Saying, "Experiencing some friction is good for building character" is not equivalent to saying "We should demolish all technology and force babies to survive on their own in the woods."
That the extreme position is wrong does not strictly imply that the moderate position is too.
This is the particular problem with deciding a position, it's all shades of grey.
200 years ago a good number of humans thought that owning other humans was a-ok. Today that's mostly not true. In 200 years it's likely the vast majority of humanity will look at eating meat and owning pets at the same level of horror. Which is the extreme position? Which is the moderate?
Magnitude pedantery incoming: 1 billion years is "only" about 10 trillion hours.
Think of combined manpower. If you have 2 people working an 8 hour shift you've spent 16 hours.
/Pedantry crisis averted.
Fun math!
[0]Crockford et al. (2023) estimate about 10^30 cells exist today, and between 10^39 and 10^40 cells have ever existed on Earth.
I think it’s possible that this concept that AI is an easy shortcut is a form of gatekeeping.
We had the same reactions to StackOverflow and web search when those technologies came around. And there’s certainly partial truth to it. Maybe reading a full book really does make you more well-rounded than googling your answer, but sometimes blowing a lot of time searching an index in a physical book hoping to find the piece of knowledge you need is just spending time for sake of spending time.
Maybe you never learn to check your own details. Maybe that's ok.
"I should run my purchase decisions past an AI in the future."