The Intelligence Crossroads

Robert Frost wrote, “Two roads diverged in a wood…”

We are now at a crossroads: AI and social media are making it easy to delegate our cognition and agency to otherworldly systems. And we now need to pick.

Take the road most people are taking and just let ourselves be plugged into the machine, where our agency and cognition are at the mercy of someone or something else. Or gradually unplug ourselves from this system and use it as a tool, not as a substitute for our free will.

This road is harder because thinking is hard. But it is the only one of the two roads that actually leads anywhere.

Being on the first road is like going on a never-ending treadmill in a dark room, constantly moving but never actually getting anywhere or gaining anything. And though it feels amazing, these systems have been engineered by some of the smartest people in the world to capture our attention and make leaving them extraordinarily difficult. Yet, we need to decide for ourselves how it is we want to spend our days.

How we spend our days dictates how we spend our lives. And this is going to be a very important moment in history for deciding what those lives will look like. The deeper we get into the system, the harder it becomes to get out. We still can, but it takes much more effort as we slowly lose our mental muscles, our sense of self, and our internal locus of control.

In that sense, we are also on a boat that has already left the dock. Those who start swimming back now still have to put in some effort. But as the boat moves farther away, the swim back becomes increasingly difficult, and there are more obstacles between us and where we started.

The farther we let ourselves drift, the harder it becomes to return.

Only once we reach land can we start moving inland toward our goals, developing and flourishing as human beings.

AI and social media are not inherently bad. They can be incredibly useful tools. The problem is that all of this is happening incredibly fast, faster than we have had time to understand what it may be doing to us or what we may be giving up in exchange for its convenience.

The technology is moving quickly. We need to make sure our ability to think and choose for ourselves moves with it.