Our worst nightmare should not be the fear that Artificial intelligence (AI) will take over the world and destroy humanity. No way! In such a fictional battle for power, someone will eventually succeed, either out of luck or wit, in shutting them down. And then, what happens next after years of depending on AI?
Our greatest nightmare should be that over-dependence on AI will result in a generation of people who are very smart in getting results, yet woefully unintelligent, without creativity and without imagination.
The uniqueness and power of humans, lies not only in our ability to show emotions, but our unparalleled ability to think, create, imagine, plan and innovate. Yet, in the quest to achieve more, humans are gradually, with all the excitement, handing over this power to machines.
Newton's third law of motion seems to apply to every facet of life. "To every action, is an equal and opposite reaction."
While our everyday interactions with AI produces training data to make machines more intelligent, the abdication of our power of intelligence and imagination, reverses this process. We learn to 'not to think' and to 'not create'. It is only a matter of time, for enough training data to be produced to retrain our brains to be lower versions of ourselves.
It is worth noting that, what has been created is not only an issue of 'machine learning', but also 'human learning'. AI does not work for free; it gains by learning from those it works for, and humans equally learn this experience of easy life. This results in a divergent dependency relationship.
In the absence of a deliberate effort to also learn from AI, program it, control it and think ahead of it, we stand to lose more than we gain in the long term.
The release of thousands of AI applications in less than 6 months has started a new bidirectional evolution where machines and humans are heading towards opposite destinations. The process of reverse programming of the human brain just boarded a rocket ship to travel back in time.
Evidence is the creation of many AI experts in less than 6 months, most of whom know little to nothing in basic math, can't write a single line of code, or even understand the basic architecture of the simplest AI model.
Yet, as it always happens in the initial stages of every addiction, the mind is tricked into the quicksand of serotonin with the term 'prompt engineering'. Many have become hooked up to this, but unless this evolves into a form of computer language to control the backend algorithm of AI, it only empowers machines more, and leaves us with nothing beyond getting tasks completed quickly. But as stated earlier, we only become 'smart but less intelligent': This is the likely state of the next forms of humans, if this process continues without a deliberate counter strategy.
Seeing beyond this fuzzy haze is the real gold mine that AI reveals. The complexity of artificial intelligence only shows that, a sect of humans is evolving into super humans. Their thinking is getting sharper, their imagination, wider, and their creativity and innovation, super. While majority of the people will depend on AI, the power to take over the world will rest, not with AI but with the people that AI depends on. Where you stand will matter.
The more we relegate our unique ability to reason and to create to AI, the more we polarize the intellectual spectrum into a highly intelligent few and woefully unintelligent masses. This should be our greatest nightmare because, slowly and unintentionally, the highest form of human power is dripping into the tank of a very few; our data, our intelligence and our creativity.
Remember, machines have no interest in taking over the world, history shows that it is humans who do, and this time, the humans who control AI.
Therefore, it is very expedient to not just use AI to improve your productivity or relief yourself from boring work, but also, using it to improve yourself, sharpen your intelligence and creativity, and preserve your sense of humanity. Because soon, not many will have these traits, and those who do, will be near super humans.
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