What Happens When We Stop Thinking

Is artificial intelligence switching us off?

A few months ago, I used ChatGPT to help me answer a few financial questions.

I have money in France, where I live, and money in the UK, where I was born. We’re talking small amounts here, but I wanted to know the best options, seeing as the exchange and interest rates are forever fluctuating due to the uncertain economic and geopolitical situation.

In the past, I would have used a pen, paper and a calculator to work it out. I’m not a Maths wizard, but I’ve always enjoyed playing with numbers; it keeps my mind busy.

I’m not talking about 20 or 30 years ago here. I’m talking about last year when I was doing a similar thing, sorting out my tax. I used a calculator and a piece of paper and laid out all the options in neat columns and rows.

Only this year, I got lazy.

Instead of dragging out my calculator and finding a pen, I simply asked ChatGPT. And after inputting my situation, it gave me a list of scenarios.

I could have checked them, but I trusted it and went ahead with the necessary transactions. In short, I put my life savings in the hands of a machine.

I’ve been using ChatGPT more and more, not just for pure research, of which it is very good at, but for answers to problems or situations that in the past I would have used my mind for.

Only last week, an old yew tree where I work (I’m a groundsman) needed cutting back as it was blocking light getting into the owner’s house. It was a slightly tricky situation due to the lean of the tree and the position of the house. But inexplicably, I asked ChatGPT if it had any ideas.

I was aghast. What was I doing!

In the past, I would assess the options and decide whether I could do it or if I had to call in my coworker to help me. I didn’t need a computer, that’s for sure. Yet there I was. Asking a computer how to do my job.

It was like asking ChatGPT how to shave, go to the toilet, comb my hair or even have sex. And yet I found myself doing it as though it were perfectly normal.

At our school in the late 1980s, we had BBC Micro computers, which were built by Acorn Computers in Cambridge (UK). They developed a program called Talkback, which was based on the Eliza program.

You could ask questions, and it would answer

YOU: I feel sad today
TALKBACK: Why do you feel sad?
YOU: Because of my mother
TALKBACK: Tell me more about your family.

Wow! It was amazing. It felt like it was real. Like the computer in the movie, Wargames, that had recently been released. It was as though it had real intelligence.

I continued.

YOU: I have a father. But my mother is dead.
TALKBACK: That is sad. How do you feel?
YOU: Sad
TALKBACK: Why are you sad?

I now know the responses were from prewritten scripts depending on the answers. And used keywords like “mother” and “sad” to prompt the next response.

Of course, I didn’t know this at the time. For me, as a ten-year-old, it was fascinating even if I went round in circles until I got back to where I started.

ChatGPT is a million times more powerful than Talkback, and the similarities are almost non-existent. AI gets real-time data from a billion different sources, whereas Talkback is stuck in its programming.

If I had asked it about how to prune a yew tree, it would have said: Please Go On. The default command for: I don’t understand.

However, there is one similarity. While I knew Talkback was just a bit of fun — a game almost. In my fragile emotional state (my mother had recently died), perhaps I was looking for someone to speak to. Someone to ask questions to.

At the time, the program must have seemed revolutionary. Just like ChatGPT does today. And why people ask it, not just mundane questions on finance, but how to run their lives.

If we used Talkback today as adults, we’d see its limitations. It would be more of a novelty, and we wouldn’t ask it to run our lives. Even if back then, I tried.

But that’s what we are doing with ChatGPT and/or all the other similar programs on offer. Handing over our brains to a machine. As soon as there is a mildly difficult problem to solve, we pull out our phones. And it’s making us brain-dead. It’s a drug. Like deadening oneself with booze at the end of the day, now we’re deadening ourselves with ChatGPT.

One might argue that it’s just a bit of fun like Talkback was. Seeing what it can do. See if you can outfox it (I used to do that with Talkback). But things are different. Only a year ago, I was using a pen and paper; now I’m fully immersed.

When we once thought about a problem, a puzzle, or a calculation, now a machine does it for us. And how far do we go until we give everything up to a machine? A point in time when we are no longer ourselves, and we can no longer distinguish whether we are sad or not.

YOU: Am I sad?

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