Don’t Fear AI — See You In The Mind Gym

I have been concerned – well actually freaked out – about how AI has the potential to truly destroy us.  I am not talking in this Dialog about the Arnold Schwarzenegger Terminator movies – although that also is a risk — I am talking about how AI will greatly impair — and for many of us end — the need for human thought, as we increasingly just ask ChatGpt or Gemini or one of the other AI Apps.  

 

I wrote a Dialog calling this the impending AI-Pocolypse coming for us, which highlights this risk.  Here is a link to that article — https://thebruceprojects.com/averting-the-ai-pocalypse/ — which highlights the essence of the risk.

 

But as I despaired, I realized I was missing something big, which gave me hope that there could be a rainbow at the end of these AI clouds.  Let me show you what I mean…

 

First, let me refer you to my AI-Pocolypse article that treats on this subject [link].  If you don’t want to read my full article, I can put it in a nutshell as follows:

 

AI is a wonderful servant (to those who already know how to think, create and be human) but a terrible master (to those who haven’t developed these skills or don’t have the drive to create them).  

 

As an example, if want to find the cube root of 11,700,000, I know if I spend a few hours I could probably find a way to figure it out, but instead I asked Google, which told me in about one second:

 

227.018868065

 

Since I was writing this article, I double checked – multiplying that number out three times — and Google was right.  

 

So I probably saved a solid half hour – or maybe more – using AI as a servant to figure this out.  Plus I am guessing that even if I had a few hours I couldn’t have figure it out to 8 decimal places.  

 

As a less simple example, I can now ask AI to write year-end reviews of lawyers in my law firm, give me business plans for new business ideas, and pretty much anything I want.  I think of AI as (sort of) a way to ask all of humanity for its input on just about any question.  And it saves me a lot of time.  And since I am a deep thinker at heart, this is wonderful as it expands what I can do – what I can create – and what I can achieve.  What a wonderful teammate AI is.  Woohoo!  

 

So for us oldsters, who already know how to think, AI will be a tonic, but for younger people – i.e. the future of humanity – AI will gradually turn them into people who cannot.  So sad.  So awful.  So terrible.

 

But then it hit me.  Things are not as bleak as I thought……  

 

Hearken back to hundreds of years ago.  A man had to be fit enough to traipse through the jungle to trap and kill his meat.  And a woman, back at the house, had to be fit enough to be able to do backbreaking work, including hand-washing the laundry in a cold tub of water, chopping wood to keep the home fires burning, etc.  

 

Today, the man and the woman have an App whereby they order in food from literally hundreds of restaurants that will bring it right to their door, their heat magically comes through the walls, and you can send your laundry out for cleaning if you like.  So a man or a woman can be completely sedentary and hardly even stand up to solve all of what had to be done the hard way years ago and have a perfectly good life. 

 

But if you do that – i.e. rely on society to serve your physical needs – and just sit there, you become fat and unhealthy and get all sorts of illnesses and likely die younger.  

 

So what do some – but not all – people do?

 

They go to the gym!!!!!

 

Or they go for a walk.  Or they play sports.  Or they force themselves to have physical activity to avoid the downside of sitting around.

 

Indeed, sitting around and ordering your food plus going to the gym for a hard workout is overall a lot better for your health and longevity than tromping through the jungle to trap a deer or spending the backbreaking work doing the laundry in a cold tub of water in the winter.  

 

Now instead of being forced to trap our game and do the laundry by hand we can optimize our lives by sitting by while others do the stuff we don’t want to do but also going to the gym to keep ourselves healthy.  Things are a lot better than they were for sure.  

 

And then it hit me!  That is the answer to the AI-Pocolypse!

 

The next iteration of humanity will have this same choice.  We can sit around and let the AI do our thinking and learning and become unhealthy blobs of intellectual jelly.  

 

Or we can go to what I would call the Mind Gym – although it could use a better nickname.  

 

There are all sorts of concepts here as you start to think about it.  Maybe for the Mind Gym you go to an empty room with your teacher.  Instead of it being a yoga teacher in leotards, it is a thinking teacher, the room is bereft of all technical stuff, and you exercise by doing mind-numbingly difficult problems or creating beautiful things using just your brain. 

 

Then – drum roll – instead of having AI atrophy your brainpower, it augments it.  

 

And there is another positive aspect to this.  Consider what many believe is the biggest infirmity of school and teaching nowadays?  It is the rote learning that may blast some information into our skulls – for purposes of passing specific tests — but is almost the antithesis of thinking and reasoning.  This new learning process that avoids AI help will cure that problem since the whole point is thinking rather the forced memorization.

 

So to conclude – my prediction for the future – actually now at least moderately optimistic – is that just like the differences between those who are physically fit and those who allow themselves to become physically unhealthy, we will evolve to humans who are either intellectually fit or intellectually unhealthy.  And just like for physicality, this intellectual health (or not) will be tethered to how much and how hard we work out.  

 

Although I am now less negative about AI than I was, I don’t want to move us fully into euphoria, since this won’t necessarily hit nirvana for us humans, since those who are intellectually unhealthy will have some real problems finding uses (dare I say jobs) for themselves, i.e. the dichotomy between those who are intellectually healthy and those who are not will be pretty bleak.  But even with this outcome, I am a lot more positive now about the future of humanity and AI than I was before I wrote this.

 

Maybe the AI-Pocolypse won’t destroy humanity’s ability to think after all.

 

See you in the Mind Gym.  

 

Bruce

The Bruce Philosophical Project