It's hard for me to argue with these few direct sentences.

    They delegitimize knowledge, inhibit cognitive development, short circuit
    decision-making processes, and isolate humans by displacing or degrading human connection.
    The result is that deploying AI systems within institutions 
    immediately gives that institution a half-life.

e.g., an LLM-equipped novice becomes just enough of an expert to tromp around knocking down chesterton's fences in an established system of any kind. "First principles" reasoning combined with a surface understanding of a system (stated vs actual purpose/methods), is particularly dangerous for deep understanding and collaboration. Everyone has an LLM on their shoulder now.

It's obviously not always true, but without discipline, what they state does seem inevitable.

The statement that AI is tearing down institutions might be right, but certainly institutions face a ton of threats.

The examples that the paper cites that are historical are not compelling, in my opinion.

The authors use Elon Musk's DOGE as an example of how AI is destructive, but I would point out that that instance was an anomaly, historically, and that the use of AI was the least notable thing about it. It's much more notable that the richest man in the world curried favor by donating tens of millions of dollars to a sitting US president and then was given unrestricted access to the government as a result. AI doesn't even really enter the conversation.

The other example they give is of the FDA, but they barely have researched it and their citations are pop news articles, rather than any sort of deeper analysis. Those articles are based on anonymous sources that are no longer at the agency and directly conflict with other information I could find about the use of that AI at the FDA. The particular AI they mention is used for product recalls and they present no evidence that it has somehow destroyed the FDA.

In other words, while the premise of the paper may seem intellectually attractive, the more I have tried to validate their reasoning and methodology, the more I've come up empty.