In the late 1970s, I was a student working on my doctoral thesis in linguistics at Indiana University in Bloomington, USA. There were no such things as laptops or cell phones, and using a personal computer was still a rarity.
Calling Tripoli through the operator was an event I did weekly. Because I can hear the voices of my beloved parents, who have now passed away, and they can hear mine.
We still had to wait for the digital IT revolution started by Bill Gates and others, so there was no email, and the fastest means of communication were still telephones and telegrams.
Of course, there was no such thing as GPS yet, and despite some setbacks, we managed to traverse America's vast wilderness with nothing but a map, a pencil, and a hot cup of coffee to keep us awake while listening to country music on the radio and cassettes.
I gave all these examples just to show my readers, especially the younger generation, how technologically advanced we have become over the past 40 years and how dependent we are on our devices.
Speaking of GPS, for example, I remember being stopped on Republic Street in Valletta a few months ago by a young tourist who needed directions to Upper Barrakka. I almost pointed to the spot.
As she thanked me and was about to leave, I noticed she was checking her phone and walking in the wrong direction. I caught up with her and told her that was different. And to my surprise, she said: “Oh, thank you, there must be something wrong with my GPS.”
Of course, my point isn't that we shouldn't trust devices like GPS because they can make mistakes just like humans, but rather that we shouldn't rely on them so much that we're numbing ourselves.
The newest and arguably most advanced in our devices is artificial intelligence (AI). Through a labyrinth of algorithms, it mimics human intelligence and improves cognitive abilities at an astonishing rate.
It is built on a large network of billions of parameters trained on vast amounts of text that allows it to learn patterns in language.
As Noam Chomsky and other linguists have shown, humans learn, or more precisely acquire, language through an innate ability to construct rules, so language can be described as rule-governed behavior, capable of producing a potentially infinite number of sentences through a finite set of rules.
AI does not have this capability because it is pattern-managed, but it is a system that can “learn” and generate a response by predicting what text will come next based on the patterns it has learned.
AI is an artificial system, not designed to replace our own thinking– Sadun Suayeh
Although the human mind seems to have created a system based on its own image, it is still an artificial system, not one designed to replace our own thinking.
However, there is a growing trend among many people to use it as a magical tool of thought to solve virtually anything, especially through applications such as ChatGPT. When I started writing this article, my grandson advised me to turn to ChatGPT to speed up the process. He said people are now using the tool to write emails, letters, business reports, medical reports, petitions, visa applications, term reports and even poems and love letters.
We know that many of us are increasingly relying on AI applications such as ChatGPT, but we're nervous about the possibility of a “device” or “system” doing so many tasks for us, perhaps doing homework for schoolchildren or writing columns for journalists.
Will this lead to cognitive laziness and intellectual atrophy? Or am I pessimistic about a device that could open up hitherto unexplored or unthinkable frontiers for humanity?
I ask these questions not to provide the reader with an answer, but to increase their curiosity. Personally, I enjoy using ChatGPT and I like to make fun of it. I'm a linguist, so I like seeing how people deal with the complexities of language, especially in translation. I submit to it to translate lines from Shakespeare into Arabic and lines from classical Arab poets into English.
Sometimes translations seem poetically awkward but semantically accurate, but sometimes they are wrong. However, this system has been improved with amazing results. In fact, we (the system and I) discuss alternatives and enhance its learning capabilities.
But no matter how much we try to make AI devices human-like, they are still sophisticated neural networks of mathematical algorithms created by the human mind.
We should be wary of over-reliance on such systems and the frightening prospect of creating an Orwellian world of robots for future generations.
The question, then, is not whether AI will make us less intelligent, but rather whether we will choose to make it less intelligent by sacrificing it in an age of easy answers and trusting GPS with our destinations.
Saadoun Suayeh is a former ambassador to Malta and Libya.
