Thinking, As We Know It, May Cease to Exist

Maybe the strangest of all of Kissinger and Schmidt’s AI predictions really has little to do with AI at all. Instead, it oddly has to do with the enlightenment idea of “reason.” Piggybacking off the idea that AI will fundamentally alter human reality, the authors go a step further and argue AI with all its transcendent, unearthly insight, may actually bring about the death of the basic mode of thinking that’s defined human civilization for centuries. The logic here is AI will not only find and create new things (think drug discovery) but will actually detect, “aspects of reality humans have not detected.” Increasingly AI models may be based not on “theoretically understanding,” but instead on, “conclusions based on experimental results.”

“In an era in which reality can be predicted, approximated, and simulated by an AI that can assess what is relevant to our lives, predict what will come next, and decide what to do, the role of human reason will change. With it, our sense of our individual and societal purposes will change too.”

At the same time, the flood of information hurling its way toward every human being appears destined to bloat even further, as thicker and thicker data soups are needed to feed hungry algorithms. That data overload, the authors write may “increase the cost and thus decrease the frequency, of contemplation.” Not only will AI make end up making more decisions for us, but we—the lowly meat bags, drunk off our data debauchery—may end up dumber than ever.