Artificial Intelligence and Human Stupidity
Humans are biologically the weakest of creatures. Here, biological weakness refers to the capacity to adapt to one’s surrounding environment. According to biologists, plants rank first in their ability to adapt and acclimate to their environment, followed by animals, with humans coming last. Yet humans have dominated the Earth and controlled its destiny, as well as that of plants and animals, not because of biological superiority, but due to the brain’s ability to store information, retrieve it when needed, and process it according to necessity. Thanks to this trait, humans have developed history, and they have been able to leverage that history to support their future and enrich their present. Thus, it is memory, and the ability to retrieve, process, and develop it, that has made humans the masters of the Earth, not physical strength or bodily superiority.
Such memory is now threatened by a new form of human-made memory. Artificial intelligence today is undermining the influence and authority of traditional human memory. In a manner reminiscent of the Frankenstein myth, which is not merely about assembling a monster from dead human parts, but fundamentally about how humans created a force they found themselves unable to confront or bear responsibility for creating—essentially, they created an enemy and then refused to accept responsibility for their creation. Today, humans face a dilemma similar to the Frankenstein myth. The artificial intelligence developed by the human mind may turn against us in the near future, especially since AI can now analyze vast amounts of information in ways that surpass human capability. However, it has not been able to eliminate human traits such as extremism, bigotry, lust for power, greed, and others. This places us before a complex equation today: on one side, a sharp, advanced, rapid, superhuman, and precise artificial intelligence; and on the other, limited human intelligence, constrained by affiliations and human instincts. This leaves humans today facing a strange paradox between the tools they have created—which grow stronger, smarter, and more superior day by day—and the alarming decline of human wisdom that shaped human history and enabled humanity to achieve what it has accomplished to date.
No one, including those who created and developed artificial intelligence, can predict what such a shift in roles may bring to humanity and its future. Nor can anyone provide a clear vision that ensures a safe exit from the quagmire of this transformation, which is becoming increasingly beyond human control, or guarantee the proper and safe use of all the challenges AI poses today to traditional human intelligence and reason.
No one denies the value of technological development, including artificial intelligence, in fields that serve humanity, such as medicine, pharmaceuticals, transportation, and communications. The problem here is not the development of AI itself, but the direct challenge and confrontation it poses to traditional human intelligence, which is increasingly classified as “stupidity” in the face of boundless, unrestricted superintelligence. The most important question here is whether artificial intelligence is capable of building and sustaining a civilization of value, like all the civilizations humanity has passed through. Civilization implies the supremacy of human wisdom, innate intelligence, a transformation in patterns of thought, freedom, and the ability to distinguish between good and evil, between strength and justice, between responsibility and evasion, among other qualities that cannot be reduced to a machine, no matter how precise or technologically advanced it may be.
The next challenge, therefore, is whether artificial intelligence will compete with, eliminate, or merely mimic human innate wisdom. In doing so, humans would lose an element that has long distinguished them from other creatures and made them the masters of the Earth. Will artificial intelligence enhance that human distinction, or will it entrench the phenomenon of human stupidity?
Suad Fahd Al-Muajjal
