Wherever I go, I still hear people voicing their concerns about AI. The stories I hear bear a striking resemblance to the texts that once circulated about the Internet. I use AI as a tool and feel no shame about it, much as I felt no shame in the mid-1990s about using the Internet. By now, many of those early opponents are, if anything, even more active online than I am.
Just as I was not without criticism of certain consequences of the Internet back then, I am certainly not uncritical of AI now. But I do not share the commonly voiced fears. That may be easy for me to say, since I am 70 and do not have to worry about my job being taken over by AI. I still often work twelve hours a day, and in that context AI plays a very positive and supportive role.
There is, however, a danger in AI that I find underexposed and rarely articulated in discussions, and for that I need to step back in time for a moment. As Dutch people, we were involved in extensive colonization in what was then called the New World. That did not come without a cost to humanity. Our role in the slave trade is well known, but there was more. Like other colonizing nations, we brought diseases to which the original populations had no resistance, such as smallpox and other illnesses. We also brought unhealthy habits.
We brought missionaries as well, tasked with converting the “savages” to the one true faith, centered on a man who could walk on water and who now, from heaven, ruled over good and evil.
In doing so, we colonized the minds of the people whose lands we had occupied. And we were successful.
Back to the present. Europe and the United States are drifting further apart, yet our developments in AI are lagging behind. While we have contributed certain building blocks, such as chip technology, there is little that can compete with companies like OpenAI or Anthropic. The cultures of America and Europe are increasingly at odds, and because AI is also used to determine what may or may not be shown or said, we now find ourselves in a situation that can best be described as the colonization of the human mind.
All kinds of cryptic expressions are being used to shape thought according to the rules of digital platform operators. You hear people increasingly say “unalived” instead of simply “dead.” People make gestures with their hands to visualize certain sexual acts, and so on. When you think about it, this is quite a profound intrusion into our mental world.
The argument is always that people must be protected from the malicious intentions of others. Especially children, of course, except when they happen to live in Iran or Gaza, or work in sweatshops where our luxury accessories are assembled at low cost.
We have already seen how Facebook deliberately engaged in influencing elections.
What happens when AI penetrates so deeply into our minds that our own ideas about important matters, even down to individual words, are steered toward norms largely shaped in the United States, while we, as a majority, find it deeply undesirable?
There is only one conclusion: our minds are being colonized. Is that desirable? Would it be acceptable if Iran did it, or Israel? No. In the end, one’s own culture feels most familiar, and that culture, without excessive moral policing, with reasonably affordable healthcare, childcare, and without the burden of puritanism, is something we value.
No one is waiting for this:
We are the Borg. Lower your shields and surrender your ships. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile.