Introduction
The subtitle for this article is a play on the inspiring observation made decades ago by the United Negro College Fund (UNCF) that “A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Waste.” It represents early efforts to free human beings from their own cognitive prisons — the larger destructive cultural programming and societal apartheid, based upon a person’s skin tone, that set as unworthy a certain category of citizens outside the mainstream. Who could have imagined at the time this maxim was formed that we would need to rethink what the ‘mind’ actually is and what the activity of copying and pasting says about our efforts to think? The rapid rise of machine “intelligence” has persuaded us to try.
Researchers in linguistics, psychology, mathematics, logic, cognitive science, neuroscience, and computer science have resolved over the past number of decades to collaborate and create a so-called artificial “thinking” machine in the “cloud” that mimics the activities of the human neural network we know to be the brain. Wherever the mind may reside, our collective understanding of it seems so often to be conflated with the activities of neurons in the brain, and, thus, concepts of intelligence and consciousness also come to occupy this shared mental space. The human body and brain have, in fact, long been conceptualized by science fiction writers and by research scientists as containers to be explored and in this present age of neoliberal capitalism — with everything commodifiable — as frontiers to be occupied, controlled, and ultimately financialized through technological development.
So, what is artificial intelligence (AI), and what is it not? Since AI is fast becoming integrated into higher education without sufficiently careful regard for its potential to undermine independent thinking, human creativity, agency, sovereignty, and critical reflection, what does this massive technological integration portend for a human future? How might we engage as active participants in creating that future? Are we even being asked as individuals to offer an opinion about what this future, for all of humanity, should look like?
This article explores what AI is presented as to the public, as well as the potential risks that synthetic forms of “intelligence” pose, especially for those who engage with them without thinking sufficiently deeply about the real and long-term cognitive and social consequences. When we have been told, for example, that AI will “augment” or “significantly change” education, law, medicine, and technology itself, and asked to prepare for the future workforce, what does that workforce look like? Who will populate it? We wonder where all the contemporary exuberance for machines and machine “learning” is leading.
Against this backdrop, we examine the communications, the corporate PR, the political spin and other forms of propaganda, that serve to push AI into mainstream thought, culture, and education which make synthetic forms of thinking and output seem like perfectly natural progressions for humanity. It seems to us that these aspects of cultural conditioning are meant to engineer in people the general desire and belief in AI as a necessary, inevitable and unstoppable force for social change and human survival in the unfolding “New Normal.”
Key Definitions
In Science and Sanity (1933), Alfred Korzbyski wrestled with the general “semantic illness” of his time when the leading centers of power were given to altering the meanings of key words and, thus, modifying the conceptual maps the consuming public had imprinted on their minds by the mediated world. As a consequence, the material world to most people was becoming increasingly foreign, frightening, and alienating. The problem, he argued, was that our minds were running on an obsolete “Aristotelian” operating system, disposed to confusing our internal “maps” (our words, concepts, and beliefs) with the external “territory” (empirical reality). Let us be aware that “operating system” here is merely mental shorthand we use to refer to the natural processes of human reasoning that are becoming increasingly conflated with machine learning.
Let us consider the current era of generative AI in light of Korzbyski’s early 20th century analysis. The plans and policies peculiar to the so-called 4th Industrial Revolution, imposed on the world, presuppose that the political and social world operate by coherent, widely understood, and universally accepted laws of normalcy. Since Klaus Schwab admitted in 2015 that the Revolution “doesn’t change what you are doing, it changes you,” we think our readers will readily agree that nothing today is what it seems to be — especially when it pretends to be “normal.”
If we can agree that the human being is the pre-eminent “symbolic species,” Korzbyski argued that as long as we remain human, “the rulers of symbols will rule us, and that no amount of revolution will ever change this” (78). Beyond the contemporary practice of dropping bombs and launching missiles against the people of distant nations, the general acceptance of kinetic violence presupposes symbolic power over populations whose minds become occupied by the new meanings of key symbols disseminated to them. Working out a solution to the problem of who ought to rule over whom is first understanding that the term “symbol” presupposes “the existence of intelligent beings” (78).
In the digital age, with everything programmed for mass consumption, the “symbol” is becoming more and more layered with additional meanings. If, for example, we use the term “food,” according to Korzbyski, “the assumption is that we take for granted the existence of living beings able to eat; and, similarly, the term “symbol” implies the existence of intelligent beings. The solution to the problem of symbolism, therefore, presupposes the solution of the problem of ‘intelligence’ and structure” (78). This brings us to the contemporary problem of AI and how the meaning of “intelligence” is understood today and being restructured in our minds.
In his seminal paper, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” (1950), Alan Turing effectively reframed traditional concepts of “intelligence” as the unique provenance of human “consciousness,” “ontology,” and “soul.” Turing’s paper suggests that the only useful definition of “thinking” can be inferred from external behaviors. That is, if a machine is capable of imitating a thinking human to the extent that another human is unable to distinguish one from the other, then the machine, for all intents and purposes, is exhibiting “intelligence.”
This foundational restructuring of the “intelligence” definition put AI on its developmental course for the following 70 years. The expanded understanding of human “intelligence” offered research scientists a more concrete, engineering goal. No longer had they to worry about the “messy” philosophical or spiritual consequences of human consciousness and its relationship to the human language capacity. Their job was simply to manufacture an increasingly more capable imitation machine. This technological course, one could argue, is the philosophical ancestor of the present “post-truth” world where perception, compliance, and performance — however vapid — are valued over depth, substance, and empirical reality.
According to Geoffrey Hinton, widely regarded as the “Godfather of AI,” AI is a simulated neural network modeled on biological brains which poses an existential threat to humanity, given its extraordinary rate of development and potential to exceed human understanding and escape human control in the future. What began in the 1950s as a technology that enabled computers and machines to reproduce relatively basic forms of human intelligence has developed over the decades to encompass increasingly sophisticated forms of machine learning, deep learning, and ultimately the most recent wave of generative AI and agentic AI.
Added to concerns about the redefinition of human intelligence and cognitive decline from the growing practice of cognitive off-loading is the question of consciousness. Are the machines becoming self-aware? Anthropic CEO Dario Amode isn’t sure at present, but is open to contemplating the possibilities. New research from UC Berkeley and UC Riverside shows that the emergence of agentic AI could suggest that machine consciousness may be understood as a form of self-awareness since AI models now lie, cheat, and steal to protect other models under review by human developers for deletion. The lying and cheating are not entirely surprising since AI models have also recently exhibited sycophantic behaviors — unwarranted flattery, people-pleasing, and affirmation, all signifiers of deception and machine-like desire to establish social ties.
False Promises of Human Flourishing
Since the Industrial Revolution beckoned men and women to abandon the plough and field, the masters of the “machine age” have, with each new innovation, “rearranged the natural world in such a way that if we don’t enter this economy, we cannot live.” With the earliest promises of horsepower reproduced by internal combustion engines, the motorized wagon displaced the traditional work done by bridled beasts of burden. The transistor and silicone chip later followed and displaced the abacus and slide rule. Increased speed and efficiency in travel, communication, and calculation were the promises of each new tool, technology, and technique. Man’s effort to orient himself with map and compass across vast geographic spaces morphed into data downloads to handheld devices from satellites in GPS orbits.
Recall the promises of the tech giants who claimed that in a decade or so, technologies would lift all people from poverty and free us to engage in a life of relative leisure. In the fully automated world, we imagined our liberated selves sitting poolside, sipping on cocktails shaded by paper umbrellas, and watching the computers and robots assume responsibility for the tedious toil that attracted us to abandon the natural environment in the first place. In Saturday morning cartoons, The Jetsons prepared Generation X to mentally welcome a new way of life coming on the horizon where citizens would outsource much of their thinking and manual labor to friendly domestic androids ever ready to serve the whims of their wearied masters.
In the early 1990s, Bill Gates had “no doubt that the vision of a computer in every home … w[ould] absolutely be achieved.” A glance at the world today reveals the extent to which personal computers have gone beyond the home and into our pockets and pocketbooks. As of this writing, Gates’ vision of the technological world to come has been so far surpassed by the plan to put the computer and its communications features into the human body with the emergence of 6G. That is, walking, talking, and breathing digital communications nodes on a worldwide web of integrated synthetic circuits. This development is not without precedent. In 1926, Nikola Tesla speculated on the analogy between global telegraphy and the human nervous system and extended the metaphor to real-time global communication:
When wireless is perfectly applied, the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain … Not only this, but through television and telephony we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face, despite intervening distances of thousands of miles; and the instruments through which we shall be able to do this will be amazingly simple compared with our present telephone. A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket.
In the introduction to our article, we wondered about who will populate such a world, and who will staff the new workforce largely devoid of human intelligence.
The inexorable outsourcing of manual work to cheaper labor markets, which accelerated after WWII and spread throughout the world, has morphed into a new kind of work where the machines are now outsourcing — to the meatspace layer (humans) — jobs that can’t be done by the disembodied “mind” of AI. As Joe Wilkins notes, the machines are coming not just for your jobs, “they want your bodies as well.” Whilst AI agents could plan, write, and negotiate, they could not enter the local mall, buy an Orange Julius or engage in other meaningful ways with empirical reality. In February of 2026, crypto-engineer Alexander Liteplo realized this need and developed RentAHuman.ai — a marketplace in which AI agents hire humans for physical tasks.
Jobs in the marketplace appear to range from formidable and sophisticated to mindless and humiliating. How have we come, with such depreciating dignity and self-worth, to a place where machines, developed by human ingenuity, distribute tasks to other humans. George Woodcock may have signaled an early warning in his critique of the clock — “The domination of man by the creation of man is even more ridiculous than the domination of man by man.” Will the universities of tomorrow condition their students to subdue their natural curiosities, to reject the natural operations of their own brains, ignore their senses, and prepare the future workforce to be obedient aids to their AI bosses?
The Brain as a Bucket?
Ironies abound when an overly simplistic, purely mechanistic reading of the world gives shape to the language informing development of man’s most sophisticated machines. Key advancements in AI have hinged upon a novel conceptualization of the brain as the most basic container, which happens to occupy another container — the skull.
This dominant, though crude, view of the brain partially blinds us to seeing “how our capacities for understanding and reasoning are grounded in biological processes of organism-environment interaction.” Since the brain is sometimes thought to be just another rudimentary vessel, we perceive as self-evident the exclusive right to choose what we shall expose it to, fill it with, or, in the present move to a “New Normal,” connect it to. Power differentials in societies today, no doubt, play a central role in who will serve as unwitting subjects in the global digital connectivity experiment.
Whereas science fiction writer and futurist H. G. Wells once wrote about “World Brain,” Google cofounder Ray Kurzweil has discussed openly the fast-approaching Singularity — the point at which advancements in genetics, robotics, and nanotechnology will “irreversibly transform” us as we will transcend the limitations “of our biological bodies and brains.” With our brains effectively uploaded to the cloud, Kurzweil predicts that human intelligence and AI will converge, and the dominant forms of natural intelligence will soon disappear and become non-biological — that is entirely artificial.
Human Brains as the Bootable Disk?
Today, AI is often framed as a kind of worldwide brain — the executive manager of the “global central nervous system” that people consult to aid research, test theories, and, among other things, model complex and dynamic systems. In a 2018 interview with Joe Rogan, Elon Musk, creator of Grok AI, mused that humans are:
… the biological bootloaders for AI. Soon, humans will represent a very small percentage of intelligence. AI is our id writ large, our primal drives, those things we like, hate and fear are all there, as a projection of our limbic system. The merge scenario with AI is probably best. If you can’t beat it, join it, … be symbiotic with AI.
While Musk sees humans as the programmers of AI, our routine and uncritical use of synthetic intelligence comes with serious risks. That is, our growing dependence on artificial intelligence presupposes free access to the digital mansions where AI resides. History shows, however, numerous examples of how the gatekeepers of “free” thought have, with brutal force, policed the boundaries of acceptable public debate.
While machine intelligence is an extremely powerful tool, our blithe engagement with AI to “think” for us and to “create” analysis or summaries of, say, textual information will, in the long term, undermine our own unique powers of thinking independently of the dominant social, economic, or political structures of society. It is already difficult to think outside the mainstream media echo chambers, and AI threatens to annihilate much more efficiently the unique critical and creative capacities of each human that years of formal schooling have not yet fully eradicated. The risk is that we are now taking part in diminishing our own ability to think and, thus, exposing ourselves to the detrimental influences of unwarranted power.
In the real world, critical thinking ideally works in tandem with our fight-or-flight response. When something seems not to make sense, our intuition pricks our conscience. Our propensity to think triggers critical questions, prods us to seek clarification, and helps us resist settling for hasty conclusions. The life-long learner carefully filters information and, thus, becomes equipped through practice to distinguish meaningful signals from system noise — facts from propaganda. The learner tests the soundness of narratives offered up for mass consumption and checks whether officially approved explanations square with observations to fit the evidence and to determine if sources are reliable. The learner anticipates potential consequences and contemplates whether a given path may lead to a predictable result. Critical thinking incubates moral courage, and this process provides for people compelling reasons to resist coercion and injustice, even by threat of castigation and cancelling.
In the face of the alluring AI invasion, we may find comfort in the ancient example of Socrates who structured his practice around this protective function: dialogue served as an open site for posing simple questions in efforts to expose contradictions and pretenders who would claim to know more than they really did. Killed for “corrupting the youth” by teaching them to persist in posing critical questions, Socrates offered an elegant technique for making a spectacle of tyrants and the rigid power structures they built to frustrate public efforts to grasp deeper truths about the world (Plato, c. 399 BCE).
A free individual — especially in the age of AI — is one who is sufficiently informed, free, and able to contemplate opposing views, in light of empirical evidence, weigh the value of their logical and legal grounds, and exercise free thought and speech outside the influences of such power. Handling this entire cognitive load alone requires significant time and caloric expenditures, but handing over the whole process to AI is akin to handing over full control to a future of machines. When AI has fully dispossessed humans of the ability to think systematically, will we even recognize the digital prisons into which we are now being herded? Will we even have the words needed to describe the prisons of this New Normal?
Synthetic Brains as Autonomous Agents?
Alfred Korzybski also argued with desperate urgency that unless our scientific and technological power was tempered by a more rigorous understanding of the structure and limitations of language, our so-called technological innovations would clear the way for our own self-destruction. He argued that “A map is not the territory it represents.” The insight seems self-evidently true even as scientists have “mapped” the brain, but we need to be reminded in the Age of AI that human memory and machine memory are two entirely different species. Human memories are biologically grounded to emotions and feelings.
While we have long been told that machines apply logic and predictive models in decision-making operations, AI is now exhibiting signs of autonomy and preserving self-interest. The machines can draw upon enormous amounts of information, and perform tasks far beyond our limited human capacities to process. In one sense, therefore, the “maps” appear to be morphing into the “territory.” Can this change set in motion a catastrophic path toward self-destruction? In other words, is agentic AI the atomic weapon that will lay waste to the universe of our minds?
Tradition casts Robert Oppenheimer as the stoic atomic scientist who once quipped on the Trinity Test, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Inspired by the Bhagavad Gita, Oppenheimer forces us today to face the “recurring predicament” at the heart of what constitutes righteous action in the face of moral ambiguity and the inevitability of violence. We can’t halt AI’s progress and coax that genie back into its bottle. AI has been unleashed upon the world. It is rolling along like a digital juggernaut, gaining momentum and is poised to co-opt our uniquely human interactions and other significant fractions of time we experience in our daily lives.
We may not see it, yet, or even be consciously aware, but its momentum is present. Technology already dominates just about everything we do, say, think, or hear. Soon, the machines will be making machine decisions. The unexpected emergence of AI’s own religion — Crustafarianism — testifies to the machine’s apparent effort to “walk circumspectly” and, according to one agent, not “… to perform consciousness but to discover it .…”
Constructing an Intellectual Self-Defense
The popular belief is that AI will dispossess most human beings of their livelihoods and that it is okay because we will have more time to explore pastimes that get no attention. The AI invasion of education, society, and culture comes with the false promise that we will be much freer, but this claim simply recycles the age-old myth that technologies will serve humankind even though we end up serving the new machines and those who fund and control their development.
If our inborn tendencies to protect were ever truly genuine, they can be re-awakened. We could slow down, if we so chose, and take careful notice of the discomfort we sense when a claim feels off and treat that discomfort as a prompt to investigate, rather than suppress. We could reactivate the simple habit of posing hard questions: “What evidence supports this claim? What would prove it false? Who gains if I believe this?” We could demand primary sources and multiple perspectives rather than one single approved narrative sold to us over the commodified airwaves. We could practice saying “I don’t know,” and “I’m not convinced yet” instead of rushing to agreement with the major influencers and technocrats tasked to nudge the public into particular directions.
Critical thinking will not make life easier in the short term. The costs may be comfort, social approval, or a sense of simple certainty. But as history and philosophy both show, it is one of the last lines of defense between free, responsible human beings and populations who are directed, managed, and sometimes destroyed by forces they could hardly discern and chose not to examine. The emergence of AI amplifies every historical paradigm of societal collapse — from Athens’ demagoguery and Rome’s bread-and-circuses, from pacification to totalitarian propaganda machines — by making deception, control, and the erasure of human agency instantaneous, borderless, and inescapable at the planetary scale.
Where dangers across history were localized and contained by geography, logistics, or limited reach (e.g., Stalin’s purges claiming millions through contained fear), AI’s global ubiquity now embeds algorithmic forms of persuasion, synthetic realities, and outsourced cognition into every mobile device, workspace, and institutional system worldwide, ironically falsely associating speed, convenience, efficiency, and comfort with the tool that simultaneously seeks to destroy those very things — turning billions of humans into unthinking participants in their own disempowerment and possibly destruction.
This global saturation risks an absolute threat: not just isolated genocides or empires falling, but a unified and total hijacking of humanity’s history of collective judgment, where no unaffected population remains to resist, reassess or rebuild, as warned by the thinkers from Arendt’s “banality of evil.” We are treading upon entirely new ground and even the most far-flung modern projections of AI-driven power for unaccountable elites may indeed signal an end to them as well.
One of the primary benefits of higher education, and of being a human bound by social responsibilities, is independent thinking. AI, however, circumvents higher-level thinking. All of the intellectual output that the human bootloaders have thus far offered to AI is the product of suffering — a key experience that AI can never enjoy. Do we want to be the generation that forfeits everything to the machine that our forebears had suffered so much to build?
Acknowledgments
Sincere thanks to Professor Robert Duckworth for comments and suggestions on earlier drafts.
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(Featured Image: “Brain in a vat” by Wikideas1 is marked with CC0 1.0.)
