While the brightest minds of artificial intelligence are running to make the technology think more like humans researchers at Elon University asked the opposite question: How will AI change the way humans think?
The answer is accompanied by a worrying warning: many technology experts fear that AI make people worse in humanity -essential skills such as empathy and deep thinking.
“Fear – for now – that while there is an increasing minority benefiting more and more significantly from these tools, most people will continue to give up their autonomy, creativity, decision -making ability and other vital skills for these still primitive Ias,” wrote futurist John Smart in an essay sent to the university’s nearly 300 pages report, “THE FUTURE OF HUMAN“, Which was provided exclusively to the CNN before its publication on Wednesday (2).
Concerns arise amid a continuous race to accelerate AI development and adoption, attracting billions of dollars in investments, skepticism and support from governments around the world.
Technology giants are betting that AI will change the way we do everything – to work, communicate, seek information – and companies like Google, Microsoft and Meta are running to develop “AI agents” that can perform tasks on behalf of people. But experts warn of the report that such advances can make people excessively dependent on AI in the future.
AI proliferation has already raised major questions about how humans will adapt to this new technological wave, including whether this can lead to loss of jobs or hazardous misinformation generation. Elon University’s report further questions the promises of technology giants that the value of AI will be in the automation of repetitive and monotonous tasks, allowing humans to devote themselves to more complex and creative activities.
Wednesday’s report also comes in the wake of a survey published this year by Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University, which suggested that the use of general AI tools can negatively impact critical thinking skills.
Fundamental and revolutionary change
Elon University researchers interviewed 301 technology leaders, analysts and academics, including Vint Cerf, one of Google’s “internet” and current vice president; Jonathan Grudin, professor at the University of Washington School of Information and former Research and Project Manager at Microsoft; Charlie Firestone, former Executive Vice President of the Aspen Institute; and Futuremade futurist and CEO, Tracey Follows. Almost 200 of the respondents wrote complete rehearsals for the report.
More than 60% of participants said I hope that AI will change human capabilities in a “deep and significant” or “fundamental and revolutionary” way in the next decade. Half believes that AI will create changes for good and evil in equal measure, while 23% said the changes will be predominantly negative. Only 16% said the changes will be mainly positive (the rest stated not knowing or predicting little change in general).
Respondents also foresaw that by 2035 AI will cause “mostly negative” changes in 12 human traits, including social and emotional intelligence, ability and willingness to think deeply, empathy and application of moral judgment, as well as mental well-being.
Human capacity in these areas can get worse if people are increasingly resorting to AI for tasks such as research and construction of relationships for convenience, according to the report. And a decline in these and other essential skills may have worrying implications for society, such as “growing polarization, expansion of inequalities and decreased human autonomy,” the researchers wrote.
Report employees predict that only three areas will experience predominantly positive changes: curiosity and learning ability, decision making and problem solving, as well as innovative thinking and creativity. Even with the tools available today, programs that generate art and solve coding problems are among the most popular. Many experts believe that while AI can replace some human jobs, it can also create new categories of work that do not yet exist.
The evolution of AI
Many of the detailed concerns in the report are related to the way technological leaders foresee that people will incorporate AI into their daily lives by 2035.
Vint Cerf believes that humans will soon depend on AI agents, who are digital assistants capable of performing tasks independently, from taking notes at meetings to reservations in restaurants, negotiating complex business contracts or writing codes.
Technology companies are already launching initial versions of these agents – Amazon states that their reformulated voice assistant can place supermarket requests, and the goal is allowing companies to create AI agents for customer service on their social platforms.
These tools can save time and energy in everyday tasks and assist areas such as medical research. However, Cerf also cares about the growing technological dependence of systems that can fail or make mistakes.
“It is also possible to predict some fragility in all this. For example, none of this works without electricity, right?” said Cerf in an interview with CNN . “These dependencies are wonderful when they work, but when they don’t work, they can be potentially dangerous.”
Cerf emphasized the importance of tools that differentiate humans from IA bots on the Internet and transparency regarding the effectiveness of highly autonomous systems. He urged companies that develop AI models to maintain “audit trails” to allow investigations about when and why their tools make mistakes.
Futuremade Tracey Follows, told the CNN who expects the interaction of humans with AI to go beyond the screens where we currently talk to chatbots. Instead, technology will be integrated into various devices, such as weather, and buildings and houses, allowing people to ask questions aloud.
However, with this ease of access, humans can begin to delegate empathy to AI agents.
“AI can take on acts of kindness, emotional support, care and fundraising for charity,” Follows wrote in his rehearsal. She added that “humans can form emotional bonds with AI personalities and influencers,” raising concerns about whether authentic and reciprocal relationships will be set aside in favor of more predictable and controllable digital connections.
Humans have already begun to form relationships with AI chatbots, with varying effects. Some people, for example, have created replicas of deceased loved ones to seek emotional closure, while parents of young people took legal action after claiming that their children were harmed by interactions with AI chatbots.
Still, experts say there is time to mitigate some of AI’s worst potential scenarios through regulation, digital literacy training and simply prioritizing human relationships.
Richard Reisman, a senior researcher at Foundation for American Innovation, said in the report that the next decade will mark an inflection point to determine whether AI “increases or decreases humanity.”
“We are being led in the wrong direction by the dominant power of the ‘techno-industrial complex’, but we still have a chance to correct it,” Reisman wrote.
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Is this content originally published in Ia will change how humans think? Experts respond on the CNN Brazil website.
Source: CNN Brasil
Charles Grill is a tech-savvy writer with over 3 years of experience in the field. He writes on a variety of technology-related topics and has a strong focus on the latest advancements in the industry. He is connected with several online news websites and is currently contributing to a technology-focused platform.
