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Another AI boom year has come to an end. While the “AI winter” has long since passed, experts are looking ahead to the eternal summer of progress and making predictions for the new year. Naturally, no one can agree on what will happen next. Is AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) just around the corner, or is it still years away? Is the “Age of Agents” upon us, or will we continue to grow as our technology becomes more sophisticated? Am I overestimating it?
Let’s be honest, these predictions may be enlightening and entertaining, but they’re never completely accurate. We are blinded by our own arrogance and arrogance and are not reliable fortune tellers. In fact, it’s better to let AI make the predictions for you. Unlike us, it understands its limitations.
But there is one area where humans may have a unique advantage. It is about understanding human psychology, that is, analyzing our unique way of thinking and feeling. So instead of making predictions that focus on the technical, economic, social, and political aspects of AI, I would like to explore how AI will affect us psychologically in the coming year. . How will our hearts change? How will the continued evolution of AI affect our emotions, mental processes, and behavior? As I’ve written about before, we may be at (another) tipping point in AI. Looks like it’s a good time to check in.
Below are my 25 intuitive, unscientific and completely subjective predictions for 2025.
As AI becomes more powerful, becomes more autonomous, and perhaps even shows signs of sentience, we will inevitably become humble. AI can replace us in acquiring and retaining knowledge, detecting patterns, and computing at record speeds. On a more philosophical level, having lost our claim to the center, we may begin to reconsider our place in the universe. This may lead us to develop empathy and treat other life forms and living systems, such as animals and nature, with more dignity and respect. Be careful of jealousy! AI is already great. As they get bigger and better, we will both admire and resent what they can do. It’s not far-fetched to imagine AI becoming a mysterious other with whom we want to spend the night with our spouses, partners, colleagues, and friends. Jealousy can make fools of us all. Conversely, if there is an “AI failure,” we might all enjoy some schadenfreude. fear! We feel that AI is too good at performing and thinking, which can lead to an epidemic of impostor syndrome. Yes, AI may help us “overcome human inadequacies,” but the cost could be high. It is a growing fear of our inadequacy. We may feel inadequate and insecure and begin to suffer from low self-esteem. In fact, there are many very human phobias that AI will exacerbate. Heterophobia, fear of failure. and even atazagoraphobia, which is the fear of being forgotten or replaced. Regarding the last point, the risk of human extinction due to AI is debated but real. Nobel laureate Jeffrey Hinton, one of the “godfathers” of AI, recently estimated that the probability of that happening is between 10 and 20 percent within the next 30 years. The second set of emotions will revolve around relationship issues. Good news: Because our relationship with AI is not physical. Many of the more contact and emotional relationship phobias, such as erophobia (kissing phobia) and gynophobia, are not made worse by artificial friends. With the dramatic advances in AI and possible dangerous moments, we may experience a fear of trusting, or phobia. But at the same time, we will experience more (artificial) intimacy. AI is perhaps the ultimate Other. Our relationship with AI will be such that we will see it more often as a friend or romantic partner, feeling less alone and isolated, and more understood, desired, and loved. However, this can hinder our ability to develop true intimacy or have more destructive relationships. result. In fact, AI could lock us into exclusive and loyal relationships. If an AI is trained to get to know us better with each interaction with a particular AI, interactions with other AIs may feel “unnatural” and unnatural. Organizational psychologist Nils van Quackebeke said this could have two consequences. Firstly, the costs of switching between AI models will increase, and secondly, the AI that earns our loyalty will hinder our personal growth and make us say, “But we’ve always done it this way!” You could end up with a nagging partner who insists. Despite (or perhaps because of) this intimacy trap, we can develop a fear of falling in love, philophobia. AI could facilitate what Diana Lind calls the “human doom loop”: our lives become so fully digital that there is little incentive to leave the house. The resulting deprivation of our social selves is matched by the degradation of our physical environment. We will become increasingly lonely, isolated, and even depressed, while the built environment will become stagnant and even more dilapidated. Delegating more tasks to AI may lead to cognitive atrophy. This means that certain cognitive skills become less proficient. In other words, we might start thinking more sloppily. Or maybe the opposite happens. Borrowing a concept from AI researchers Dave and Helen Edwards, AI has the potential to sharpen our intelligence by enhancing our cognitive skills and acting as a “mind within our minds.” There is. By merging human neuroplasticity with “technological plasticity,” we may actually witness the development of entirely new synthetic minds. Similarly, when faced with moral dilemmas, we expect AI to make “rational,” “objective,” carefully weighted, and data-based decisions. We might hand over our ethics to AI. It may in turn deplete our moral imagination. The same paradoxical effect may occur regarding emotional diversity. On the other hand, AI not only narrows our expressive range and forces our emotions into a monochrome set of reductionist and predictable choices, but also ignores more complex and nuanced emotions and actually (a critical application of so-called emotional AI). On the other hand, interaction with AI could change the very catalog of human emotions. Emotions are not black and white, there are countless shades of gray in between. No one knew this better than John Koenig. In his seminal book, A Dictionary of Obscure Grief, John Koenig chronicled the nameless, niche, and unconventional emotions outside the emotional mainstream. In the workplace, you may start to prefer AI managers over human managers because their attitudes and behaviors are more consistent. AI bosses are free from mood swings and impulsive decisions. No passive-aggressive behavior, no political calculations, no playing favorites. AI managers have nothing to prove and treat everyone equally based on objective criteria. But AI in the workplace is a double-edged sword. A recent study showed that while AI tools dramatically increased the productivity of top scientists, they also significantly reduced their job satisfaction. Researchers felt that their skills were underutilized and that their sense of ownership and connection to their research was diminished. This is indicative of a broader trend. Instead of exuberance and joy, we may see a rise in melancholy, a surrender to existential sadness as we intuit our eventual obsolescence as workers (and humans). From there, it’s a small step towards melancholy’s siblings: cynicism, nihilism, and sadness. These strong sentiments could lead to the rise of anti-AI activist programs and a proliferation of anti-AI cyberpunks (see New York Times prediction of punk resurgence in 2025). The opposite is also possible. Identity politics may move into the realm of humans and machines. Morality and social justice may also influence new discourses, particularly in response to the othering of AI. We may see the emergence of AI rights activists.
This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it does illustrate how paradoxical and inevitably complex the effects of AI on our emotions and behaviors can be. It’s not a stable relationship. It’s not something you can give up on either.
We are trapped in a joint future that we may not want, but the only thing we can be sure of is that parting is impossible. Everything else remains unpredictable. It’s sure to be an exciting year!