# AI is useful for everyday tasks but has not yet broadly advanced human knowledge

DevFeed: [AI is useful for everyday tasks but has not yet broadly advanced human knowledge](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/ai-is-useless-but-it-is-our-best-bet-for-the-future-20639.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<http://antirez.com/news/148>)

Published: 2025-03-23T08:13:53Z

Content type: opinion

Language: en

Sources: [Antirez](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/antirez.md>)

Topics: [Artificial Intelligence](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/ai.md>), [AI Strategy](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/ai-strategy.md>), [Code](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/code.md>)

Tags: [ai](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/ai.md>), [artificial-intelligence](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/artificial-intelligence.md>), [research](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/research.md>), [software](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/software.md>)

## AI overview

The article argues that AI is useful for tasks such as coding assistance, explaining scientific papers, image generation, translation, and transcript cleanup, but has generally not yet advanced human knowledge fundamentally beyond rare examples such as AlphaFold. It considers whether limited future improvements would justify the social upheaval caused by AI.

## Source excerpt

I used AI with success 5 minutes ago. Just five minutes ago, I was writing a piece of software and relied on AI for assistance. Yet, here I am, starting this blog post by telling you that artificial intelligence, so far, has proven somewhat useless. How can I make such a statement if AI was just so helpful a moment ago? Actually, there's no contradiction here if we clarify exactly what we mean. Here's the thing: at this very moment, artificial intelligence can support me significantly. If I'm struggling with complicated code or need to understand an advanced scientific paper on math, I can turn to AI for clarity. It can help me generate an image for a project, make a translation, clean my YouTube transcript. Clearly, it's practical and beneficial in these everyday tasks. However, except for rare, groundbreaking examples like AlphaFold -- Google's AI that significantly advanced our understanding of protein folding -- AI has yet to genuinely push forward human knowledge in a fundamental way. Aside from these few exceptional results, AI hasn't (obviously) yet matched the capabilities of the very best human minds. If an AI system were at the same level as the brightest humans (and not better than that: it's not needed for a first humanity jump) we could deploy millions of such systems to accelerate research dramatically, transforming progress expected to take centuries into developments happening within decades, or decades into years. Yet, if artificial intelligence remains stuck at its current level of development indefinitely (even if with small incremental improvements, enough to fire many translators, programmers, drivers, actors, ...), perhaps it might have been better not to have it at all. I mentioned this during a conference here in Sicily. The thought hadn't crossed my mind until I was asked on stage. While I was formulating my reply I asked myself: if we knew AI would only yield minor incremental improvements, would it be worth enduring the social upheaval cause