FUTURE SHOCK: Humans Are Now Beginning To Think And Speak Like AI

For years, we were told that artificial intelligence was being trained on us. It consumed our books, our websites, our conversations, our photographs, our articles and our collective human experience, learning how we speak, how we think and how we respond. The machine was built to imitate the man. But now something far stranger is beginning to emerge: the man is beginning to imitate the machine. Researchers are finding measurable evidence that words, sentence structures and linguistic habits favored by AI systems are beginning to appear in human speech and writing. The creation is no longer merely reflecting its creator; the reflection is beginning to reshape the one standing in front of the mirror.

“And he had power to give life unto the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should both speak, and cause that as many as would not worship the image of the beast should be killed.” Revelation 13:15 (KJB)

Think about the feedback loop now being constructed in real time. Human beings produce the language that trains artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence processes that language, reorganizes it and develops recognizable patterns of its own. Millions of people then spend hours every day talking to those systems, writing with them, learning from them and increasingly allowing them to compose their emails, articles, schoolwork, business communications and even personal conversations. Those AI-shaped words are then poured back onto the Internet, where tomorrow’s artificial intelligence will consume them as training material. Human feeds machine, machine reshapes human. Human feeds machine again. Round and round it goes, until the question is no longer simply whether machines can successfully imitate humanity, but whether humanity will gradually surrender some measure of its own individuality to the machines it created.

The Turing Test once asked whether a machine could speak so convincingly that a human could no longer tell the difference. We are rapidly approaching something even more disturbing: a world where the distinction becomes harder to make because both sides are moving toward each other. Artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly human in its presentation while human beings become increasingly conditioned by algorithmic language, algorithmic thinking, algorithmic recommendations and algorithmic decision-making. The great technological revolution of the twenty-first century may not ultimately be remembered as the moment when machines learned to think like people. It may be remembered as the moment when people, willingly and enthusiastically, began allowing machines to teach them how to think. The machine once studied mankind, now mankind is sitting at the feet of the machine. Welcome to The Matrix, 21st-century edition, and you’re going to hate how it all winds up.