“I have two primary worries. The first concerns the vanishing of the public sphere. By 2040, each individual – thanks to AI apps – is likely to live their own, unique life experience and the number of people’s face-to-face in-person interactions people have is likely to be reduced to nearly zero.
“Teleworking from home will reduce personal exchanges with colleagues. Personalized access to information that will exclude anything that does not correspond to the specific AI settings made by each person will create individualized realities. We could see the emergence of millions of different alternative truths, magnitudes more than what we see today.
The concept of democracy is based on the idea of the ‘agora,’ the public square, where facts (not multiple alternative ‘realities’) are presented to citizens and are commented upon and analyzed through people’s in-person interactions with others. What happens if humanity’s uses of these technologies shifts society into a state where there are few, if any, real personal connections and any sort of shared set of common, fact-anchored truths disappears and each individual comes to live in their own private world with highly varied priorities and views, all based on ‘alternative facts’?
“In such a scenario how can democracies possibly survive? The concept of democracy is based on the idea of the ‘agora,’ the public square, where facts (not multiple alternative ‘realities’) are presented to citizens and are commented upon and analyzed through people’s in-person interactions with others.
“What happens if humanity’s uses of these technologies shifts society into a state where there are few, if any, real personal connections and any sort of shared set of common, fact-anchored truths disappears and each individual comes to live in their own private world with highly varied priorities and views, all based on ‘alternative facts’?
“My second key concern regards human skills development. The introduction of the pocket calculator and calculator apps has rendered most humans incapable of applying reason to successfully achieve very simple mathematical operations. The introduction of navigation software through tools such as Google Maps has led to a progressive decline among humans in the ability to use their minds only to have a firm grasp of their geographic orientation and how to go from here to there.
What will happen when AI tools begin to replace much more of humans’ own brainwork in more and more of their myriad day-to-day actions of simple to medium complexity? We will lose other useful basic skills that humans have cultivated over the course of centuries just exactly as we have come to lack the ability to make mental calculations and as we have lost our sharpened innate sense of physical orientation. Then what will we become? What will happen in an extreme situation in which AI tools would not be accessible?
“What will happen when AI tools begin to replace much more of humans’ own brainwork in more and more of their myriad day-to-day actions of simple to medium complexity? We will lose other useful basic skills that humans have cultivated over the course of centuries just exactly as we have come to lack the ability to make mental calculations and as we have lost our sharpened innate sense of physical orientation. Then what will we become?
“What will happen in an extreme situation in which AI tools would not be accessible (i.e., during the natural hazards expected due to climate change)? Will there be a limit to these types of losses of our capacity for brain-driven intelligence? Could the type of culture seen in ‘Judge Dredd’ (a good science fiction book but a bad movie) become reality one day?”
This essay was written in November 2023 in reply to the question: Considering likely changes due to the proliferation of AI in individuals’ lives and in social, economic and political systems, how will life have changed by 2040? This and more than 150 additional essay responses are included in the report “The Impact of Artificial Intelligence by 2040”