Arundhati Roy names some of the issues regarding AI keeping us up nights.
While there is so much debate about what AI can and cannot do for humans, there is too little talk about what it’s doing to humans. Studies have warned of a relationship between AI and cognitive decline in human beings. Human intelligence looks set to plunge in proportion with the rise of artificial intelligence. Perhaps our unused brains will atrophy, our heads will shrink and our fingers will turn into undulating prompt tentacles.
Those of us who have already lived our lives in a different kind of world know what we are losing. But what of the generation that is about to come of age? Will it have its own language, its own thoughts, its own grief? Will it have the right to strive? To fall? To fail? To be imperfect? Will it experience the impossible pain and ecstatic pleasure of solving a math equation or creating art or literature or music of its own – however flawed?
The triumph of AI will be a crime against humanness. It will bottle our brains in formaldehyde. It will destroy the world as we know it. The men who promote it and profit from it are cognisant of this, and have already made arrangements to exit into another realm.
The middle paragraph especially speaks to my worries.