The AI Dilemma: Can We Maintain Our Humanity in the Face of Technological Surrender?

Not long ago, I watched a recording of a Zoom call for the community of supporters of Our AI Journey, a new, collaborative Harvard Business Review book project by Adam Brotman, former chief digital officer at Starbucks, and Andy Sack, a venture capitalist and former Microsoft advisor who worked directly with CEO, Satya Nadella.

In discussing the latest chapter of the book, which is a community-driven project whereby the readers help shape the content and direction of the manuscript in real time, Adam brought up a question that I can’t stop thinking about, which was essentially this: Assuming we become reliant on AI, what would happen if it was suddenly taken away?

By way of example, Adam pointed to his phone, which he said is now so fully integrated into his daily life that to function without it would leave him “dead in the water.”

Of course, the same can be said for most of us. Our phones assist us in so many areas of our lives that they have become near-indispensable tools for navigating the modern world.

Nevertheless, imagining a life without our phones is not impossible.

Sure, it would be an enormous and frustrating inconvenience, but it would be doable.

And that, I think, is an important distinction to make here, because when the question involves AI, it becomes an altogether unprecedented thought experiment.

Once we experience AI in all its power, when neural networks are trained on truly massive amounts of compute, will we ever be able to live without it again?

That, I believe, is the question of the moment, the one we should all be grappling with.

A real conundrum

Imagine if something went wrong in our transit system—perhaps a widescale computer virus or a manufacturing crisis—and all forms of motorized transportation were suddenly rendered obsolete.

Imagine if we woke up one day and could no longer use cars, trucks, busses, motorcycles, scooters, trains, planes, or boats.

Imagine if suddenly, and without warning, we had no form of motorized transport to rely on at all.

People worldwide would experience massive disruptions. Nearly everything would change overnight.

But all would not be lost completely because we could still walk to wherever we needed to go. Intercontinental travel would no longer be possible, and that would render us landlocked, but we could still move around.

Much would change in our society, but we would still be mobile. We would still, eventually, for the most part, get where we wanted to go.

The stakes, however, are much, much higher when it comes to outsourcing our cognitive functions, which is ultimately what we’re doing with AI, to a degree that we’ve never done it before.

According to a paper published in Science Direct back in 2012 called “Use it or lose it: How neurogenesis keeps the brain fit for learning,” we know that there is “rather extensive literature showing that new neurons are kept alive by effortful learning, a process that involves concentration in the present moment of experience over some extended period of time.”

Assuming this use-it-or-lose-it philosophy then, if I outsource so much of my brain that I significantly reduce, or even lose altogether, my ability to think critically or do math or write or read books because I rely on technology to do that for me all or close-to-all of the time, and then that technology is subsequently taken away, then how do I function?

How do I go back to who I was before?

And what if I never learned it all in the first place because I simply didn’t need to?

Real intelligence

To think, to cognize—that’s at least, in part, what it means to be human.

If all our problems indeed go away because they can now be solved by a computer, then how do we progress as a society? So much of our identity as human beings is tied up in our ability to think and work that if we no longer have to think and work, what’s left?

We know how to walk because we’ve done it before. We know how to live without our phones because we’ve done it before.

But what happens to the next generation, the generation of children who learn, from the very beginning of their lives, to use AI for everything, the generation of children who don’t see working and thinking as fundamental to their nature because they simply don’t have to do it—or don’t have to do it to the extent that we did?

Who do they become if AI is then taken away?

What self do they return to if no previous self exists?

It’s easy to dismiss these sorts of questions as implausible or alarmist, and I admit that they’re certainly theoretical, but it’s the cognitive function of parsing the theoretical, of trying to understand what’s going on right now and what the consequences might be—in both business and society at large— that each and every one of us should be thinking about.

There’s no doubt that AI is going make a seismic shift in every part of our lives over the next decade.

What I’m trying to understand is whether it’s possible to wield the power of AI without becoming completely subsumed by it.

It feels to me like the key is to hold on to our humanity as long as possible, to understand that in the “human + machine” equation, both sides aren’t—or shouldn’t be— weighted equally.

The human has to be the priority, lest we lose ourselves completely for the sake of advancement and innovation.

Even amidst the excitement and possibility of this moment, we need to remember who we were before all this, who, until very recently, we thought we would always be.

We need to remember that we are human beings who can think and work and read and write and learn—so that even if we don’t have to think and work and read and write and learn anymore, we can still become those human beings again should we need to.

It’s also important to understand that before artificial intelligence there was, simply, intelligence—the real stuff—and it was that intelligence that made us who we are.

We observed and hypothesized about and grappled with the problems of our lives and we used what we learned to chart a new course, to avoid the paths that delivered us to those problems in the first place, so we could arrive and grapple with newer, bigger problems.

Which is maybe how we arrived here.

We’ve been solving the problems of our lives so earnestly that we’re now on the cusp of solving a great deal of them at once, and I’m not sure we know exactly what to do with that.

We’ve come full circle only to realize the circle is actually a spiral.

Which brings me all the way back to Adam’s question: Assuming we become reliant on AI, what would happen if it was suddenly taken away?

The answer, I suspect, is that it would different for each and every one of us.

But we’d all do well to remember that indexing heavily on critical thinking, on learning the way we always have while simultaneously celebrating and experimenting with AI is probably the right path forward.

Because when the coming technological wave, this tsunami of artificial intelligence, finally crashes on the beaches of our lives, we’ll still need to discern which direction to run.