We are feeding a beast, one conversation at a time

I have been thinking a great deal about artificial intelligence recently, not because I fear it, nor because I worship it, but because I have become increasingly aware of how naturally it has settled into my life. It helps me prepare for board meetings, challenges my assumptions, sharpens my writing, finds gaps in my thinking and occasionally asks better questions than the ones I had intended to ask myself. That is an extraordinary achievement for a technology that, not long ago, felt like the preserve of science fiction. We are witnessing one of the most significant shifts in human history and, for the most part, it has arrived without fanfare. It came disguised as convenience.

That, perhaps, is why I find it so fascinating. Most revolutionary technologies announce themselves with noise. Artificial intelligence has done the opposite. It has slipped into our routines with remarkable ease. We reach for it before we reach for a search engine. We consult it before we consult colleagues. We ask it to write, critique, analyse, recommend, explain and even challenge our thinking. Somewhere along the way, we stopped treating it as a tool and started treating it as a companion. I am not convinced we noticed the precise moment that happened.

None of this is an argument against artificial intelligence. Far from it. I would struggle to justify abandoning a technology that has democratised access to knowledge on a scale previous generations could scarcely have imagined. A graduate in Lagos now has access to intellectual assistance that once belonged almost exclusively to those fortunate enough to study within the walls of the world’s most celebrated universities. Small businesses can now compete with organisations many times their size because capability is no longer determined solely by headcount. Those developments deserve genuine celebration because they represent progress in its most practical form.

Progress, however, has always carried obligations alongside opportunities. Every conversation we have with these systems leaves behind something of ourselves. We begin with harmless requests. We ask for help drafting an email, improving a presentation or understanding a regulation. Before long, the conversations become more revealing. We describe difficult colleagues, complicated relationships, career ambitions, business strategies, financial concerns and private frustrations. We explain not only what we think but how we think. We reveal our judgement, our habits, our preferences, our biases and our aspirations. Individually, those conversations appear insignificant. Collectively, they form something remarkably close to a map of who we are.

Perhaps the simplest way I have found to explain today’s AI landscape is through a neighbourhood rather than a laboratory. If Anthropic lived on my street, I suspect it would be the neighbour who somehow knew everybody’s business without ever appearing intrusive. ChatGPT would be the neighbour who preferred to hear every story directly from you, listening patiently, asking thoughtful questions and remembering astonishing detail. Around them would live dozens of other models, each equally curious, each collecting fragments of human experience until, together, they possessed an understanding of the neighbourhood that no single resident could ever hope to match. None of those neighbours are necessarily malicious. Curiosity has always gathered more information than hostility ever needed.

That is why I increasingly believe we are feeding something far more significant than another software platform. We are feeding a system with the accumulated habits of humanity itself. Every prompt becomes another lesson. Every correction becomes another refinement. Every debate, disagreement, joke, confession and moment of uncertainty becomes another thread woven into an ever-expanding tapestry of human behaviour. For the first time in history, we are not simply building machines. We are teaching them the patterns of our own minds.

History suggests that every transformative invention eventually demands a new discipline from those who benefit from it. The printing press rewarded discernment. The industrial revolution rewarded adaptation. The internet rewarded speed, although not always wisdom. Artificial intelligence asks something more subtle. It asks whether convenience should become the default answer to every intellectual challenge we face. There is a profound difference between using a machine to strengthen our thinking and allowing it to replace the effort that good thinking requires. That distinction may prove to be one of the defining questions of our age.

I remain optimistic about what artificial intelligence will enable. It will almost certainly accelerate scientific discovery, reshape education, improve healthcare and solve problems that have frustrated generations of researchers. I hope it succeeds because the potential is genuinely remarkable. Optimism, however, should never exempt us from reflection. We should embrace these technologies with enthusiasm while remaining conscious of the extraordinary amount of ourselves we leave behind with every interaction.

Perhaps the greatest question is not whether artificial intelligence will become more intelligent than us. The more interesting question is whether, in our enthusiasm to create machines that understand humanity, we gradually become less willing to understand ourselves without first asking a machine what to think. If that day arrives, we will not have been defeated by artificial intelligence. We will simply have surrendered one of the oldest and most valuable disciplines we possess: the willingness to wrestle with our own thoughts before handing them to someone, or something, else.

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Michael Irene

Michael Irene, CIPM, CIPP(E) certification, is a data and information governance practitioner based in London, United Kingdom. He is also a Fellow of Higher Education Academy, UK, and can be reached via moshoke@yahoo.com; twitter: @moshoke