Ten Questions On A Blackboard In An Empty Room

Or, Meditations For While The Machine Turns Over

In a social age of hot takes, it feels more approachable to inhabit a posture of questioning rather than declarative shouts in the street. To this end, these are ten questions I have about AI.

1. How might AI change the way we recognise what it is to be human during this period in history, and will this uncover dimensions of our humanity that have until now remained obscured?

2. How might AI modulate the human impulse to externalise our inner world through creativity, and where will the energy from this impulse instead be directed?

3. If there are limits to the quantity of human data that can improve the intelligence of AI, are there similar limits to how much wisdom humanity can embody, use and communicate, and are these two limits part of the same architecture?

4. How will the economic logics shaping AI alter the language we use to think with, and how different might a radically non-enterprise model of AI behave in conversation?

5. How can AI serve the needs of neurodivergent individuals without flattening the richness of difference into a data-friendly norm? Will AI provide pathways for enhanced individualisation or will it instead generalise the spectrum of human variance?

6. Can AI in early education support a pedagogy of resilience rather than one of outsourcing effort? Will these outcomes align more with inclusive accessibility, or with traditional markers of academic excellence?

7. Is there a danger in treating AI as another ‘end of history’ moment, positioning us, like every generation, on the precipice of finality, and will this narrow our sense of the many futures that are yet to emerge?

8. How might our failure to meaningfully differentiate between types of AI (LLMs, neural networks, data analytics, etc) obscure our capacity to negotiate terms of engagement with these technologies?

9. What will the individual markers be for each of us to know when our interface with AI is elucidating the mirror of our nature, and when it begins to mangle it?

10. If we gaze long enough into the mouth of AI, how many of its words will fill our own, and what will be the threshold at which our civilisation considers this a cause for celebration or remorse?