"If society relies too much on AI to think, it could end up losing critical skills. It's not so much that AI will replace human intelligence, but that humans will stop exercising it." This is what AI tells me when I ask if it will one day replace human thought.
It's already started to do so, surely. You only have to go out on the street and see how we walk around glued to our phones, or how we increasingly use AI for every task, and how it's spreading to the most visible and most invisible places. The brain hooks up to the machine, and the machine takes over, modifies it. It's been a lifetime. The mind seeks rest. And what a rest it is, for the brain, when, after a period of abstinence, it can hook up again!
How will we know, if we've ended up being one thing? I think of Aristotle's definition of man as a rational animal. Can the machine's imitation unleash the rationality of the rest of the person? Is it still rationality, a pure rationality? To compensate, to humanize ourselves, will we return to religions and mysteries? Is it possible that what for thousands of years had served to distinguish us—so presumptuously—from animals is now precisely characteristic of a machine? Are we beginning to see a shift toward irrationality in order to maintain a freedom we entrusted to reason?
Because AI is worrying in terms of freedom, precisely. It's that freedom that makes us human, not reason. But, as AI itself told me at the beginning of the article, we tend to be comfortable with not exercising intelligence. Can there be freedom without intelligence? I'm not at all clear on that. Trump and the cyberbros They go hand in hand. Will there be campaigns to wean us off the machine in the future, as is the case with tobacco? But who won't be hooked enough to want it? And how will we do it, without the machine, to get rid of it? And who will give up the machine if they want to rule the world?
Perhaps before long, this very article will be unpublishable, thanks to the control enabled by AI. Perhaps we'll return to face-to-face conversation and manuscripts, to books passed from hand to hand. This isn't, for the moment, what we see in the schools where we educate our children. Right now, how can the reader know this article wasn't written by AI? Because if I ask AI to write me an interesting and critical article about AI to publish in the journal, it will easily be better than what I just wrote. Except in one respect: avoiding it.
