Will AI Eradicate Us as an Intelligent Species?

DEP AI vs HI book project.

Artificial Intelligence can be found in any area of our lives, from education to healthcare to automotive, to entertainment, and even agriculture and legal uses this technology. The goal is to improve the quality of life and support us as humanity in having a healthier, more comfortable and happier life.

But does it support our life, or does it reduce the need to exercise our brain/mind, and as a result, our skills in the areas of analytical, creative, critical, or any type of thinking become more and more limited?

AI gives us quick and easy access to information. Simplifies daily tasks, like shopping, cooking and many other basic chores, as most households have “smart devices”. Our phone “thinks for us”. Whatever we need to remember, we can set an alarm for. We don’t need to remember the date of our loved ones’ birthday or think about what to buy them as a gift or write on their birthday card because the phone does it for us. ChatGPT will write the wishes and suggest gift ideas. At some point, we barely know our loved ones.

Travel is easy, as our cars “think” for us, and the phone solves the problem of finding our way in unknown cities when we go for a walk.

Entertainment is at the press of a button — if we want to watch something or play a game, it’s there at any time; we don’t need to wait a week or two to see the next episode of our favorite series. The app will even tell us what we “should watch” or what is recommended for us. There will be an app for whatever we want to do, telling us… how to live our lives.

Healthcare is improving drastically, and diagnoses are becoming more accurate at earlier stages. As a result, chances of recovering from serious illnesses are much better, and people live longer. Yet, at the same time, mental health is deteriorating from year to year. More and more people suffer from depression or other mental health conditions, and the number of suicides is rising.

Is there a correlation between AI overtaking our lives and mental health? Is AI helping us become wiser and improve our lives, or does it make us less resilient and dumber?

Education

AI can be very useful in education to create adaptive learning platforms and personalized learning plans.

However, what about an average school child? Everything they need to complete their assignments can easily be found online. Many kids do not even have the skills to evaluate if the given information is correct. They blindly believe what they find on Google or what ChatGPT spits out (which can be misleading as it is the result of imperfect Algorithms scanning through limited information floating on the Internet; many reliable sources do not allow ChatGPT to scan through their papers). Yes, if the information is for school assignment, the teachers will correct it, but outside of school, the kids just trust the Internet. And this is fraught with danger.

We have great tools that can support students in learning, but at the same time, these tools can be their biggest enemies. Let’s take a simple tool like Grammarly. It’s a terrific tool for correcting spelling and grammatical errors or learning new vocabulary. But depending on how we use it, it can lead to a reduction in learning. We don’t learn anything when we run the tool through our text and unquestioningly accept all changes. We would need to analyze every mistake to understand why it was incorrect, try to remember it, and memorize new vocabulary. If we don’t, we won’t be able to speak the language properly.

The fact is that the average person’s vocabulary is more and more limited, and most of us struggle to express our feelings and emotions and can’t clearly present our perception of a given situation. Sometimes, I wonder if our aim is to get back to a caveman and express our emotions through emojis — thump up or down, feeling happy, sad or angry. That’s it. The lack of the ability to express ourselves will negatively impact our mental health.

Many educational tools can be sportive in our learning process if used in the right way. Therefore, it is vital that kids learn about the tools they use, how they work, and what the best way to use them is. Blindly believing the information we see on the Internet won’t lead to development and growth.

Loss of Authenticity

A big part of our lives is happening online. What we see in the virtual world usually is “perfect”. Everyone seems to have a perfect life, always cheerful and happy, smiling with immaculate appearances. These individuals have ideal body shapes and looks and seemingly no problems.

While we scroll through the “perfect world”, we don’t even realize that what we see often isn’t real. Stories are written by ChatGPT (or should I say “content is generated by AI”; how should we even know if the events happened?), images designed by AI, and photos edited to the point that the shade of reality is removed from them.

We start doubting ourselves, our looks, feelings, and thoughts. The “rest of the world” is perfect, there is something wrong with us, our life is dull and boring, we aren’t “good enough”. And this thinking starts affecting our mental health.

At this point, not only does our brain not get enough exercise in analytical and creative thinking, but we are also pushing ourselves into depression, as — it is obvious that we aren’t good enough.

Social Media and Socializing

Socializing is mainly happening through social media. Many spend hours chatting with people we have never met while not having time for “real-life friends”. They do not have time to get to know the people living closest to them, try to understand them, and build proper relationships.

There is nothing wrong with interactions with people from all over the world; this can be very beneficial, too, as long as we have real friends. All the romance scams are booming. Why? Because people miss connections, and genuine, real-life friendships. Many of us miss love, affection, understanding, and compassion; we miss all these that make us humans. Most of the scams are run using AI — ChatGPT can create the best romantic answers and feel the emotional emptiness their victims are feeling.

We are overwhelmed by the virtual world. We don’t know what is real and what is fiction. We don’t know if the images we see are real or AI-generated if we read authentic stories or if it is all machine-generated reality. We do not know whom to trust and whom to follow. We try to fit in, but we are losing our authenticity and identity. In the end, we do not even know who we are. That’s a lot for our mental capacity to process…

Conclusion

What I mentioned in this article is just the tip of the iceberg, how AI could potentially negatively affect our intellectual ability and mental health. The risk is real and growing from day to day.

However, there is a lot of good that AI can bring into our lives, too. Through AI, the world is becoming our oyster — we can communicate all across the globe, learn about any topic, and visit faraway places without leaving our living room, or work in a dream job on the other end of the world while residing in a place we cherish.

AI is giving us endless opportunities. However, we will only be able to benefit from them when we keep training and improving our human intelligence. If we neglect it, allow AI to do everything for us, and stop training our minds and exercising our brains, AI will overtake and destroy us. A few individuals will control AI, but I doubt they will have the best intentions at heart. As we know, Hackers and Scammers don’t have the best intentions and often adversely influence our lives already now.

This article is for the book project AI vs HI. Many great authors wrote their contribution to the book, approaching this topic from various angles. Here are some of them, written by Dr. Gabriella Korosi, DR Rawson - The Possibilist and Gabriela Trofin-Tatár.

✍ — Published by Dr. Gabriella Korosi, at Dancing Elephant Press. Click here for submission guidelines.