In my view, the threat to humanity isn’t that AI is becoming more intelligent. The real danger is that we, and especially the next generation, are becoming increasingly stupid because of it.
In the half-century I’ve spent on this planet, I have watched essential skills evaporate. The next generations can no longer do basic mental math, they don’t know a single phone number by heart (I still know about thirty, all from before 2000), and they can’t find their way home without a GPS. And that is without mentioning the inability to sit down and read a book or watch a film from before 2010 without thinking the pace is too slow. TikTok and other shorts have given us the attention span of a goldfish.
It is a millennial-old stereotype for midlifers to complain about “youth these days,” but I see something more fundamental going wrong. For a 16-18 year old today, it is becoming incredibly difficult to acquire essential base skills. Why learn the basics of programming when ChatGPT or Claude spits it out ready-made? Why learn to spell or analyze a text when NotebookLM does it for you in an instant?
This is a classic Catch-22. Without these basic skills, how can you ever hope to verify or control AI? To be clear: Large Language Models do not hallucinate. They simply lie, or they tell us exactly what we want to hear. They are like a pathological liar who invents a reality that suits you, and without a foundation of basic knowledge, it becomes impossible to separate the wheat from the chaff. This applies to everyone, even the rector of a Flemish university and a hall full of high-intellectual colleagues who didn’t notice a thing.
There is also a dirty side to how AI is being promoted. AI follows the tradition of Uber and AirBnB: it acts as if it is above the rules and laws of our society. I’m not even talking about the Muskian “fake it till you make it” approach—if we had believed him, we would have had fully autonomous cars ten years ago. These companies position themselves above society. LLMs don’t learn; it turns out they simply copy, ignoring every copyright law in existence. Fortunately, we have German pop stars to put OpenAI in its place.
Ethically, the situation is just as hollow. Our privacy is at risk, regardless of what they promise. We see a race to the bottom where you and I are the victims.
Microsoft is integrating AI into the entire Office suite at a breakneck pace. Everything you do or receive in that essential software goes straight to Microsoft. If you want to opt out as an organization, you are forced into the most expensive M365 tiers ($57 per user per month) and need to hire expensive consultants. Even then, you have no real certainty about what they do with your data.
We must also remember the Cloud Act. This allows people like Donald Trump and his associates to easily force companies like Microsoft and OpenAI to grant access to your data. You won’t even know it happened until you are denied entry to “the land of the free” or worse.
This has been the case for decades, even under presidents we found more “likable” but whose actions were just as questionable.
We have become a resource colony for the United States, and that is largely our own fault and the fault of our leaders. Many organizations that should have protected our interests collaborated like modern-day Quislings to lock us into American ecosystems. Sometimes I think it’s Stockholm Syndrome, but I suspect more earthly, less psychologically complex factors are at play.
So, what can you do as an individual? Lesson one: you are allowed to say no. You don’t have to follow the other lemmings as they jump off the cliff. No one is forcing you to use O365, to have a Facebook account, or to share your deepest thoughts with ChatGPT. Start with the human essentials: talk to someone, read a good book, think for yourself, and once in a while, be a dedicated contrarian.