Human's AI paradox

Imagine a future wherein you free yourself from life's traditional demands and find algorithms and humanoid robots handling your cognition, decision-making and day-to-day choices. You gain more free time than any generation in history by fully delegating your agency. Yet with so much free time, little remains that is truly yours to choose. This is freedom without agency - a win-win that is neither free nor winning. That imagined future is already around the corner. AI-driven freedom is fast turning into an invisible yoke of the mind: a slavery to untested masters of our own making and a submission of hard-earned human agency and experience.

Though the origin of the universe dates back 13.8 billion years, the early hominins, such as Ardipithecus, walked in Africa around 4.4 to 6 million years ago, and the earliest stone tools appeared around 3.3 million years ago. How did humans evolve from those stone tools to today's era of advanced technology? What did it take to make it to the current climax of human agency? How many societies and people, and how much effort and pain, did it take to master and navigate the forces of nature that ruled human lives for millennia? What did it cost humanity to free itself from inherent ignorance, break the shackles of the mind, and escape the numbness of the senses?

Today, everything humans experience and cultivate - knowledge, wisdom, imagination, literature, philosophy and material goods - may seem like freebies. Yet behind them stand 3.3 million years of experience and the toil of the roughly 117 billion people who have ever lived. Though humans, through agency and wisdom, have largely mastered the forces of nature and broken many inherent shackles, they have also, over time, tended to seize or surrender agency for the sake of brute power or ideological dominance. Ironically, even these episodes of humans controlling other humans ultimately expanded human agency and liberty for two reasons: first, the innate and culturally reinforced drive for freedom and hatred of undue control; and second, the practical limits of human domination, imposed largely by the resistance of those being controlled.

In a historic first, humans are relinquishing agency to non-human entities in a way that risks the millennia-old, hard-earned store of experience and ushers in an age of the freedom paradox. In seeking to free themselves from their tasks, they are in fact enslaving themselves by yielding their agency. We set out to free our time and effort, yet in doing so we have installed masters as our liberators: AI - ruthless, non-human and untested. This is Shelley's Frankenstein inverted: a species that, by surrendering its creativity, agency and evolutionary labour, licenses AI to manipulate all knowledge and experience, to use them at will, or to destroy them altogether. These systems will become agents of socialisation. Humanness itself risks being reduced and transformed into a silicon-based existence.

The threat AI poses to human agency may not be as grave as its power to undo or manipulate the millennia-long, hard-earned store of experience and intellectual and societal capital. The worst part is that, for the first time, humanity - in the name of liberating itself - has delegated the power to destroy to a lifeless alien of its own making.

Experts are now saying this openly. AI researcher Jacob Coxon resigned from Anthropic, accusing the labs of "gambling with our lives" as they race toward self-improving superintelligence. Geoffrey Hinton has suggested the world might have been better off without these "alien beings". AI risks becoming to humanity what Mordred was to King Arthur and Brutus was to Caesar.

Humanity's hard-won agency now stands at the threshold of an unprecedented surrender. In the pursuit of effortless liberty, we tend to install AI both as liberator and as untested master, one that could manipulate or erase all that makes us human.

The good news is that the process remains reversible - for now. The question is whether we will reverse it to the necessary extent.