In a study at the Wharton School with nearly 1,400 participants, 78% followed the AI's erroneous recommendations without questioning their veracity or setting up any kind of verification. Only 12% detected and corrected the errors.

Beneath the "make it so your grandma can use it" of start-ups and corporate mandates, there was more than a very misguided conception of grandmothers. There was the ambition to expand the market by selling power—of communication, of work—without demanding the learning effort, contextualization, and maintenance that was associated with any tool of the industrial world (from a lathe or a blowtorch to an accounting program). The result was that "digital literacy" educated obedient consumers instead of critical workers aware of their tools. Now you give them an AI and they take on the role they were taught. It's not the "magic of AI"; it's a culture of passivity fostered to the extreme by a business strategy.