Good grief, how on earth did the innocent acquisition of knowledge go from being a simple and straightforward asset to a deceptive and convoluted liability, she asked herself, treading carefully in her mind along a bumpy trajectory of several disorganized yet perfectly coherent thoughts, pertaining to a subject that in recent months had emerged fully from the closet and was not only dominating international news, but also slowly & skillfully trespassing upon each person’s everyday life.
Never before, have the repercussions of the lost wisdom of the idiom, “What You don’t Know Can’t Hurt You” been as far reaching and sweeping as in the last two decades (2005 -2025), right from the inglorious dawn of the superficial, but nonetheless damaging affliction known as ‘FOMO’ (bred and nourished by the indiscriminate exhibitionism and voluntary surrender of personal privacy facilitated by social media platforms), to the far less apparent and decidedly more insidious weaponization of the IQ, with respect to the gradual immobilization of the natural and autonomous functioning of the average human brain by the infiltration of Artificial Intelligence, one of the biggest casualties being education, for as 19th century German physicist Albert Einstein once stated,
“Education is not the learning of the facts but the training of the mind to think.”
It was a subject that challenged every fiber of her being, the pros and cons so equally distributed, the prospects of an existence steered by a manufactured form of Intelligence as difficult to comfortably embrace as they were to arbitrarily condemn … moreover, it was perhaps a little too late to address and debate, the majority having already, even if unwittingly, both contributed to, and participated in the shift of power since the beginning of the information age back in the mid 20th century, from which there appeared to be no going back.
Indeed, one of the most blatant lies ever told, believed and repeated like an automated mantra by the allegedly ‘liberal’ members of the human race, is that all men are created equal, for it is glaringly obvious in every sphere of life that they are not, one of the principal inequalities being brain capacity, ostensibly benign and thereby exempt from any and all forms of governance unless misused to mastermind that which the law deems a crime.
While governments, human rights organizations and other public service institutions have been consumed by gender, age, origin, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation, class and religious inequalities, the ‘Big Brains’ have, for all intents and purposes, run amok, capitalizing on the weaknesses of the smaller ones by advancing user-friendly solutions to help them bypass their flaws and shortcomings, which whilst liberating them from the struggle for self-improvement and realization, in addition to the often harmful symbiotic relationships with their fellow human beings, are further stripping them of their sovereignty and subjugating them instead to what is, in essence, a machine, however much it may come to resemble and in the future even selectively replace the human being …
… All of a sudden, the idea of a perfectly compatible ‘virtual’ companion as means to evade both loneliness and the turbulence of conventional human relationships is no longer either inconceivable, distant or even distasteful to many, just as the possibility of advanced AI gene-edited ‘Designer Babies’ that are not only free from chronic disease, but also spared all types of discrimination by being altered to have white skin, a thin frame, good looks and so on and so forth, is becoming increasingly compelling …
… Destiny, karma, chance & fate are synonyms that will no longer be part of the vocabulary of the Homo sapiens experience, and whether we like it or not, each one of us is partly responsible by virtue of having yielded to both the Freudian pain-pleasure principle and instinct for self-preservation above all; moreover, as President Emeritus of the university of Colorado Mark Kennedy said,
“All of the biggest technological inventions created by man — the airplane, the automobile, the computer — say little about his intelligence, but speak volumes about his laziness.”
Interestingly, even while philosophy may be considered at odds with technology, it has perhaps played a prominent role in this overhaul of human existence, one of the key figures of existential philosophy in the 20th century, Jean-Paul Sartre, having declared in no uncertain terms that life was both fundamentally indifferent to existence and even absurd, for it not only continuously pits the human being against its own inescapable mortality but also imposes the burden of bringing purpose and meaning — aka, in modern day parlance, ‘relevance’ — to its essentially purposeless and meaningless life …
… And thus she was forced to conclude that the most ‘clear and present danger’ today, is neither a new form of colonialism nor extinction of the human species, but rather the volume of people that are likely to be put out to pasture, for as the proverb goes,
“An idle mind is the devil’s workshop”.