Not so hidden cost of AI

https://nypost.com/2025/06/25/tech/educators-warn-that-ai-shortcuts-are-already-making-kids-lazy

Before you read my post, please read this article. Well worth your while, I can assure you.

The article begins with :  

“A new MIT study suggests that AI is degrading critical thinking skills — which does not surprise educators one bit. “Brain atrophy does occur, and it’s obvious,” Dr. Susan Schneider, founding director of the Center for the Future Mind at Florida Atlantic University, told The Post. “Talk to any professor in the humanities or social sciences and they will tell you that students who just throw in a prompt and hand in their paper are not learning. “

Please read the article and reflect on the fact that those writing it are quoting experts in AI. That way you’ll see that I’m not alone in my fears. We’re facing a world in which some very smart people are pushing a technology and bull dozing us to accept it. Those who resist, those who want to spend some time to think, to reflect, to anticipate possible problems and think of ways to prevent harmful impact, are shouted down as being backward, ignorant old fogies. The harm of the technology is phupooed as just an example of alarmist attitudes. 

I’m not surprised to read this article. The tragedy is that children getting lazy in school because they have access to AI is only the beginning of the problem. The purpose of AI is global domination not physical but mental emotional and spiritual. Not by force because force is always resisted. But by temptation and subtle persuasion such that people welcome the chains ⛓️ with open arms. The testing ground was Facebook and later other forms of social media which persuaded people to give up their most private information to strangers to do with as they pleased. The Strangers could not be blamed for using that data nor could they be billed because that data was willingly given free of cost. Or rather I should say at the cost of The Giver, not free of cost. The Givers of the data remained poor, while those to whom it was donated bought super yachts. 

The fact is that use of AI for most people will never get beyond “Hey Siri.” But the packaging in which it is sold is that of super accuracy and super speed. The fact is that super accuracy is needed only by scientific researchers and comes at the cost of routine jobs which put food on the tables of those who do them today. High speed is once again beneficial only to researchers. But both are sold as the shiny, sexy packaging of AI. To understand this all we need to do is to look at the features of the phones that we use today and then ask ourselves how many of those features we use on a daily basis . And ask another question which is what will happen if we are unable to use those features. How will that negatively affect our lives? The real answer is that it will not affect our lives.

We don’t need that speed. If we got the answer to a question in one minute instead of in two microseconds it does not add any value in any way. But in the process we lose our ability to think, imagine, reason and decide. We get used to asking questions and then accepting the answers as if they come directly from God. We forget that every convenience is paid for with disability. When we got wheels on carts and cars and didn’t need to walk anymore those wheels transferred to chairs very useful to wheel couch potatoes into operating theaters for bypass surgery, the primary cause for which is a sedentary lifestyle. 

To give you just two examples of how AI has and continues to change our lives not for the better: Ask yourselves what is the first thing that most people do when they go to a restaurant and order a meal? Taste the food? Do they smell the aroma, do they enjoy the visual presentation or do they take photographs to post on Instagram for strangers to look at and ‘Like’? Don’t they know that the person who likes your picture has no clue who you are, has probably never eaten that food and may not even like that food but he posts a ‘Like’ because he wants you to post a ‘Like’ on his picture for the same reason; that is, no reason. 

A more sinister, more destructive use of AI is what happens today when you post pictures of your little children and grandchildren on the internet. AI gives unscrupulous criminals the ability to take your child’s picture keep the face and undress the child and take that naked picture of your child and trade it; sell it on the internet to pedophiles. There is a market for this and that is why it is so dangerous to post pictures of your children and grandchildren on the internet. What enables that is AI in the hands of people who have no values no ethics and no morals. As they say, ‘Go figure!’ 

So, when you get a machine to think for you, your mind loses the ability to think. Such minds will believe whatever they’re told, act whichever way they are ordered, and vote for whoever they’re commanded to. They will be unable to differentiate between fake and real because they’ve never seen the real. They will not even consider this to be wrong because AI has been packaged as a tool. But remember a gun is a tool. A sword is a tool but in the hands of those who cannot recognize their danger both can and do kill. 

But all this will be presented to them to resemble their choice. They will be convinced that it is smarter to chose a machine to think for them rather than to take the trouble to think for themselves. They will be made to feel good about this and to consider themselves to be highly intelligent because they chose AI over natural. They will be trained to look down upon those who disagree with them and try to open their eyes to the voluntary slavery that they are condemning themselves into. Like rats walking into a trap, they’ll go in without looking back and be surprised when they hear the trap door slam shut behind them. Then they will lo and behold the leader they elected and will wonder how that had happened. 

Minds devoid of imagination can not only not paint, masterpieces but they can’t solve problems, invent solutions, or conceptualize the future and prepare for it. You build imagination just as you build muscle, by working the mind hard. When you get AI to do that for you it is like going to the gym and watching a film on weight lifting. You may know a great deal about weightlifting but you would not have lifted any weight yourself. It is lifting weight that builds muscle not watching a film about weightlifting. It is thinking, reflecting, agonizing over creating solutions, losing sleep over the difficulty of doing all this, weeping in frustration, that generates neurons, creates new neuron networks in the brain, and increases brain capacity. It may be painful but no pain no gain. 

Just like our legs lost strength and muscles atrophied and we found ourselves at the mercy of those who push our wheelchairs; just as we lost the ability to memorize numbers when we started using smartphones; just like we lost the ability to read maps when we started using GPS; most people will lose the ability to think, write and speak, without the aid of AI. With such atrophied minds differentiating between AI generated pictures and messages and reality will go from being difficult, to becoming impossible. Such minds and such people will become the raw material for the manipulators who will use them as coal is used in a furnace. The furnace can’t function without the coal but the coal only burns to ashes. It’s the blacksmith who owns both the furnace and the coal, who walks away with the product. 

PostScript : I had a very interesting experience as I was writing this article as a response to a message from a friend of mine, in WhatsApp. As I had almost completed the article I remembered that I needed to send him the link to a map. I clicked on the link and to my horror I discovered that the AI in WhatsApp had deleted the entire article and substituted it with the map link. I laughed at myself and I laughed at the AI and simply rewrote the article from memory. So I can assure you that this article is the product of my mind and my writing and not AI.

PPS: A suggestion from a dear friend who read this and commented: Please watch this film https://g.co/kgs/TZVbPSv