Bart Blog

The brutal death of thinking in the age of machines.

AI is just a tool. But a witty one. Its wit may be fake but it is good enough to make fools of us into believing that it’s real. We have a long tradition on contesting progress. Written word or calculators have been accused of dulling our memory and thinking. Though we only know about Socrates’ written word anxiety because Plato wrote it down. The wit of AI gives us sense of smart and achievement which is not ours. Just like winning in chess with a friend by copying moves from a chess engine. When replacing our own thought with artificial cognition becomes a daily habit, we will surely grow dumber even if the masses perceived from the outside may appear smarter. Unused organs disappear. The fight for our mind is on though we have lost the battle even before it has started. There is no fight there is only eagerness to surrender intellectual sovereignty. We just left the savannah and climbed down the trees and we are already tired of all this thinking. Our mind is what makes us special in the animal kingdom — but we are willing to give it away for complacency. We do it enthusiastically, naming it progress and celebrate it as evolution. And that is just the beginning.