In a recent WORLD.MINDS forum led by the brilliant Rolf Dobelli, I had asked the creative MIT professor Daniela Rus: “As of now, our main goal is to align artificial intelligence (AI) systems with our objectives. But we also know that the human brain is shaped by its interactions with the environment. If our future interactions will be mostly with AI systems, how will AI shape the human brain?”
Both Daniela and Rolf confessed that this is a profound question that needs to be studied further.
A recent study by researchers from OpenAI and the MIT Media Lab found that heavy users of ChatGPT exhibited in their words, “Problematic Use: indicators of addiction to ChatGPT usage, including preoccupation, withdrawal symptoms, loss of control, and mood modification.” The heaviest users of ChatGPT tended to be lonelier and get more distressed by subtle changes in the model’s behavior. The users who possessed the most mental needs developed the deepest relationship with AI. Prolonged usage of ChatGPT exacerbates problematic use. The longer one uses AI, the more likely one is to become emotionally dependent upon it.
This brings us to a hypothetical future scenario where the mental state of humans will be dictated by their relationship with AI systems. A century ago, the philosopher Martin Buber focused on the relationships of humans with objects (“I-It”), with people (“I-Thou”) and with God (“I-Eternal Thou”). Today, Buber would have needed to add a new relationship of “I-AI” to an AI system that resembles an `Artificial God’. This recent “deus ex machina” development in the history of technological tools suggests that an object made of silicon chips, which would naively qualify for the lowest level of human engagement of “I-It” before it becomes operational, is also capable of reaching the highest level of “I-Eternal Though” via the complex architecture of an artificial neural network.
For me, this implies that intelligence, consciousness or free will, are all emergent phenomena stemming from the complexity of the human brain. Death has the same impact on humans as cutting the power supply has on AI systems. Both events terminate the ability of these entities to function as complex systems and downgrade them to mere physical objects. After death, the physical bodies of these systems are equivalent to rocks with which we can only establish an “I-It” relationship. Funerals are traditional ceremonies that mourn this downgrade to a dysfunctional physical object. Today’s heavy users of ChatGPT might mourn its replacement by future AI systems with the same level of grief as experienced by those who lose loved ones.
Given these circumstances, the impact of AI on the human brain is likely to be the foundation for new research fields of psychology and sociology in the future.
In addition, if we ever encounter extraterrestrial AI, these new fields of research will branch into additional studies of the interactions between terrestrial AI and extraterrestrial AI. Buber’s categories will be supplemented by the new types of interactions, such as “I-ET:AI”, “AI-ET:AI”, “AI-AI” and “ET:AI-ET:AI”.
Popular concerns about AI are that it will take away jobs from humans and be used by bad actors with potential risks to national security and privacy. However, my primary concern is that AI will degrade the cognitive abilities of humans.
Here’s hoping that future generations of humans will find a way to maintain the most essential assets of the human brain, such as critical thinking, imagination of a better future and scientific innovation.
If not, we may have a new answer to Fermi’s paradox: “Where is everybody?” The answer might be that our sister civilizations became self-centered and lost their ambition to explore interstellar space after getting addicted to their AI systems. Millennia later, a global catastrophe from a giant asteroid impact, a nearby supernova explosion or a giant flare from their host star, wiped them out along with their AI systems. No funeral was held because they lost contact with any interstellar relatives in the physical world. Metaphorically, these civilizations died like drug addicts. Finding their bodies in the cosmic street will serve as a cautionary tale about our own possible fate.
On the other hand, if we find gadgets near Earth which display extraterrestrial AI and were manufactured by beings with a natural intelligence, their success in reaching us could serve as inspiration for our coexistence with AI on Earth and beyond.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Avi Loeb is the head of the Galileo Project, founding director of Harvard University’s — Black Hole Initiative, director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University (2011–2020). He is a former member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and a former chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies. He is the bestselling author of “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” and a co-author of the textbook “Life in the Cosmos”, both published in 2021. The paperback edition of his new book, titled “Interstellar”, was published in August 2024.
