Last we heard, our brains were what distinguished us from plants, but at the speed things are going, with this takeover of artificial intelligence over our lives, before long, we risk becoming as awake as a reed planted in the middle of a frozen lake. Am I the only one to realize that we are heading towards catastrophe, that everything that makes human genius great is disappearing before our frightened eyes?
It is still not difficult to understand that if we delegate the responsibility to the machine to think for us, if we adopt the reflex of constantly questioning an artificial intelligence instead of using our own, it will not be long before our brain loses its mental faculties to become a sort of life assistant, an add-on with more than limited usefulness. Moreover, this is already the case.
We are in the world through thought. If the latter disappears, what exactly will become of us? Already, for an infinite number of tasks, from writing a presentation to operating a vacuum cleaner, we instinctively turn to artificial intelligence for help. Soon, for each problem we encounter, rather than asking our thoughts, like the automatons we have become, we will ask it to answer all our questions, from the most trivial to the most crucial.
The appearance of the calculating machine had the effect of making us incapable of carrying out the slightest mental calculation or of performing a division. Artificial intelligence will do the same with written language: by dint of using it, our relationship with language will be so altered that composing the slightest paragraph without resorting to its help will become an insurmountable ordeal.
Worse, the language used by artificial intelligence is so formatted, simplified to its maximum, that by a simple contagion effect, our brain will no longer have the capacity to understand texts written in a lexicon that is not that of the machine. When we know that literature students already experience the worst difficulties in reading novels where the language leaves its usual register to take circuitous paths, we shudder with fear at the idea of the carnage to come.
The brain is a muscle. If he only serves to command artificial intelligence to write for him, if he loses all appetite to think for himself, if he abandons the task of thinking about the world to the machine, he becomes an ectoplasm doomed to evolve in a vacuum. A brain that can no longer read or count is no longer a brain, but a dead star whose only use is to provide for the primary needs of the human being.
We are at the dawn of a formidable regression which will see the individual abandon all kinds of grandeur for the simple satisfaction of his most immediate desires. He will no longer be in the world to try to rise for himself, to understand who he is, but will seek above all to exist for the sake of existing, that is to say, to make the most of commercial society without ever questioning the meaning of his own destiny.
We will go from wonder to wonder, from discovery to extraordinary revelation, without responding to our deepest aspirations, to this quest for a meaning that eludes us.
He will no longer produce art but artifice that will resemble art. It will no longer respond to the needs of the soul and its thirst for transcendence, to embrace the monotony of an existence focused essentially on the search for ephemeral and superficial pleasures. He will renounce thought, philosophy, literature, music, everything that requires an effort of concentration to devote himself solely to games, to entertainment in all flavors.
If it will not disappear as such, it will gradually lose its substance, its depth. He will become a fundamentally passive being, no longer this restless spirit who draws his greatness from the mysteries of his origins, but an individual satisfied with himself, a person absent from the world and its fundamental issues. He will no longer create anything that is not of the order of performance and profitability. He will abandon his vitality, his poetry in favor of entirely economic efficiency. He will be alive, but dead inside himself.
It is not impossible that he will be happier, in that rapturous beatitude of the soul which becomes the simple-minded. He will thus become the idiot of an interplanetary village where the machine will maintain him in a vegetative state, a servile being whose only use will be to reproduce in order to perpetuate a race of consumers eager for new products and other gadgets of patent uselessness. We will go from wonder to wonder, from discovery to extraordinary revelation, without responding to our deepest aspirations, to this quest for a meaning that eludes us.
The train has started, nothing will be able to stop it. We can just ask to be disembarked so as not to participate in this charade. But perhaps it is already too late, the acceleration brought about by new technologies has such a ripple effect that it is no longer possible to resist it. In its mad rush forward, it projects us towards a future which will be the very negation of our past, this continuous effort that we maintain to live up to our disturbing strangeness.
We have already seen the colossal damage caused by social networks. Faced with artificial intelligence whose dangers are a thousand times more proven, we find ourselves paralyzed. We would like to respect it, use it solely for scientific purposes or to repair social injustices, but we know that this is illusory: the tide is impossible to contain, it is preparing to overflow us. With the risk of seeing humanity drown, carried away by a current far too powerful for it.
