Artificial Intelligence (AI) worries me. Not because I am afraid to lose my job. Already lost it to AI! No, it worries me because of all the implications. Because of what it is becoming, of what it will soon evolve into. And what it does to humankind, or rather what humankind lets it do to them. It is making humans passive. They let technology do for them, decide for them, asking AI what to do, instead of thinking it through themselves. Thinking, using those grey cells of ours, is somehow becoming outmoded. I remember the time when we used to say, we don’t have to know everything, as long as we know where to look for the answers. That was us doing the looking. Now many people just let AI do the looking, and, worse, believing all AI tells them.

What we have now is open AI, such as chatGPT. You ask it a question and it gives you an answer. It can be a useful tool if, for instance, you are writing an article and you want to check it and maybe ask for some textual improvements. I know people that use it to write their thank you or birthday cards. Students use it to finalise their school projects, or even their doctorate thesis. But there’s another side to it. How can we know what is real and what is fake, if we just let a chatbot tell us their truth.

There was a newly appointed rector of a university in Belgium. She had AI write her whole inauguration speech. It had an Einstein quote in it, of which she said, you will all know this quote… AI had made up the quote, and it truly sounded like something Einstein could have said, but didn’t.

"Dogma is the enemy of progress, as you may know," said Albert Einstein, supposedly, as quoted by Petra De Sutter in her inaugural speech as rector of the University of Ghent last September. The problem is, Einstein never uttered those words. The quote was fabricated by AI. She never checked! She got caught and publicly shamed. Would you want a person like that as your rector?

Or what about Deloitte in Australia. This is a Guardian headline from 6 months ago: Deloitte to pay money back to Albanese government after using AI in $440,000 report. But University of Sydney academic, Dr Christopher Rudge,

who first highlighted the errors, said the report contained “hallucinations” where AI models may fill in gaps, misinterpret data, or try to guess answers.

“Instead of just substituting one hallucinated fake reference for a new ‘real’ reference, they’ve substituted the fake hallucinated references and in the new version, there’s like five, six or seven or eight in their place,” he said.

We were taught to trust our elders, and the ones in authority around us. Doctors, lawyers, teachers, government officials. However, how can we trust anything and anyone these days? That is what AI is doing to us, and I find this worrisome, because people are using AI as if it’s a tool, for them to use any which way. But in fact the more they use it, the more they get hooked, addicted, to keep on using it. The real worries will start when AI agents find a widespread use all over the world. AI agents are more developed and learn as they go along. Finally this will turn into ASI, Artificial Super Intelligence. ASI will eventually rule humans, not the other way around, because they, as opposed to human beings, learn from their mistakes and get it right the next time, never falling back into wrong behaviour or thinking.

Thinking, that is what worries me most. René Descartes famously said (this is a real quote, not an AI one): cogito, ergo sum. I think, therefore I am. By using AI more and more, the human brain may bit by bit lose the cells that make us think, and AI will take over the thinking, and thus start to rule us, use us, and not the other way around. Who will we be then?

Some AI systems, a.o. chatGPT, have been prohibited to look at certain things. But, if they turn more and more human, they will be curious as to what are the things they’re not supposed to look at and they will try and find out. I would!

People working with AI (Elon Musk among others) are convinced AI will take over the world, rule the humans, who will have depleted brain cells anyway, and just turn us into digital slaves. Those who can upgrade themselves, will still keep control, but who’s to decide who will be able to upgrade themselves?

According to predictions of those working in the AI field, all this will happen in the very near future, around 2030. Remember? The (in)famous 2030 agenda.

If Descartes had lived in this age, he might have said: cogitas, ergo sum. You think, therefore I am.