Our Choice

Technological progress can be viewed as the gradual, yet sometimes exponential, outsourcing of our humanity. With the advent of the written word, humanity no longer needed to commit stories to memory. The bicycle and automobile took us off our feet. The calculator removed much of the mathematical process, while search engines and the “Google effect” outsourced our memory to machines and the cloud. Now, artificial intelligence is a manifestation of our desire to outsource our ability to think. If you can ask ChatGPT to tell you how to write about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, why do it yourself? Why do your own research on a subject you’re interested in if ChatGPT seemingly has all the answers?

At the same time, all of these advances, including AI, have had revolutionary impacts on our lives and propelled humanity to new frontiers. The written word allowed the dissemination of revolutionary new ideas that led to major technological, scientific, and social advances. The bicycle allowed us to better explore our neighborhoods, while the car allowed us to explore the world. The calculator allowed mathematicians to divert their attention to the discovery and exploration of whole new fields of mathematics. Google has allowed everyone with an internet connection to access the treasure trove of knowledge that humanity has amassed over millennia. These advances were often derided when invented but were eventually recognized as testaments to human ingenuity, without which we might still be in the Dark Ages.

 

Will AI and ChatGPT help humanity reach new frontiers, or will it remove the very essence of our humanity? Will we become merely observers of the life around us, living only to reap the benefits of whatever we can automate? Will we gradually lose our most human traits as we outsource the ability to learn and think critically?

The widespread adoption of GenAI does, in some ways, seem to be a step back, a danger to society. For some reason, it feels different than all other advances to date. It feels as though we are giving up our ability to think, and thus our humanity. We fear that the generation born today will immediately turn to ChatGPT when confronted with a difficult question. Yet, at the same time, AI is what you make of it. Like all the previous inventions I listed, if you choose to use AI to augment you, it has enormous potential and will take humanity to the stars and beyond. If, on the other hand, we rely on AI as a crutch, we will slowly – or maybe not so slowly – lose our humanity and become conduits, not people.

 

It is our choice to make. It always has been.