Hyping AI’s utility is part of a commercial push to get users to cede authority to machines
In his 1991 book Consciousness Explained, the cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett describes the juvenile sea squirt, which wanders through the sea looking for a “suitable rock or hunk of coral to … make its home for life”. On finding one, the sea squirt no longer needs its brain and eats it. Humanity is unlikely to adopt such culinary habits but there is a worrying metaphorical parallel. The concern is that in the profit-driven competition to insert artificial intelligence into our daily lives, humans are dumbing themselves down by becoming overly reliant on “intelligent” machines – and eroding the practices on which their comprehension depends.
The human brain is evolving. Three thousand years ago, our ancestors had brains that were larger than our own. At least one explanation is that intelligence became increasingly collective 100 generations ago – and humans breached a population threshold that saw individuals sharing information. Prof Dennett wrote that the most remarkable expansion of human mental powers – the rise of civilisation through art and agriculture – was almost instantaneous from an evolutionary perspective.
