The Domestication

From a leading Harvard AI safety expert, an explosive vision, drawn from emerging new research, of the terrifyingly short road to cognitive diminishment, as humans have begun to be caught in the flywheel of domestication.

This is not a book about AI. This is a book about the human mind in the grip of AI. Heated conversations about the impact of artificial intelligence tend to focus on one question: what AI will do to us, as if the “us” part of the equation is a constant. James Ryan argues with frightening clarity that this is missing the point.. The most important question, the one that will determine the future of our children, our civilization, and our species, is whether we will recognize AI’s power to change our essential human nature before we’ve passed the point of no return.

Ryan begins with a brilliant deep history of the co-evolution of human cognition and technology, from writing to printing through to the television, the Internet, GPS and social media, landing on AI from a running start of some four thousand years of human history. With every new technology, people worried that our minds would shrink because of these new tools -- and in fact we did lose some capacity. The brain was actually larger when humans could memorize long epic poems. GPS capacity causes our hippocampus to shrink. But we always took the deal. And it was worth it. As a result, we have been set up for a fall.

All those technologies were tools in the way that AI is not merely a tool. AI offloads cognition at a more fundamental level, narrowing and homogenizing our options, surrendering our agency to a machine primed by actors whose interests aren’t aligned with ours, robbing us of the whetstone of cognitive friction that sharpens our minds into their full human form. And at the moment we are almost entirely undefended. Much can be done, but the urgency is acute.

Ten thousand years ago, wildcats wandered into the grain stores of Neolithic settlements, drawn by easy prey. Those who could make their peace in this new world by growing tamer and more docile got an easier, less intense life. They also cut their mental capacity in half. No one forced the cats to stay. They stayed because the grain store offered easy calories without the work of stalking and hunting wild prey. The world is becoming one giant grain store, and humans are now faced with one of the greatest collective challenges in our history.