mind and machine

But there’s a deeper, unasked question that lingers in the background, one introduced by the unconventional thinker Jiddu Krishnamurti in the early 1980s: “If the machine can take over everything man can do, and do it still better than us, then what is a human being, what are you?”

Krishnamurti also questioned whether thought, in its inherently mechanical nature, could ever produce real intelligence. After all, if our thinking operates like a machine, can it truly be called intelligent?

Under current proposals for the AI Act, chatbots must tell users that they are not humans.

As smart machines and robots take over more of our thinking, the brain risks becoming lazy, unstimulated, and, frankly, bored. In a world where work and struggle are things of the past, our experiences might dwindle to nothing more than a search for entertainment and pleasure — a cycle of reacting to one shiny distraction after another. When we hit

If machines can rapidly weave together complex ideas from diverse schools of thought to uncover conceptual connections, would this type of academic activity still be deemed intelligent, and will the knowledge we’re boasting to have — our prideful capacity to activate our brain’s net of associations and comparisons — retain any significance?

Instead of asking whether machines will ever become conscious, we might ask whether humans can become conscious enough to outgrow the “artificial intelligence” both inside them and in the machines around them.

To him, meeting it meant doing everything we could to make our minds different from artificial intelligence — a call to rise above the routines that risk turning us into reflections of our own machines.