The trouble with too much certainty |
A few months ago, my older brother, a doctor by profession and temperament alike, asked me almost casually what I planned to do next. The question appeared ordinary, almost routine, yet it lingered far longer than such questions usually do. I found myself without an immediate answer, not because ideas had deserted me, but because at this stage of life the future no longer presents itself as a neat sequence of tasks waiting to be completed. It arrives instead as a pause, weighted with memory, unfinished conversations, and questions that resist tidy resolution. The impatience of earlier years has gradually receded, replaced by a disposition more inclined toward contemplation than conquest.
Before our conversation drifted elsewhere, he added, almost as an aside, that he regularly reads my columns. The remark unsettled me more than I allowed him to notice. It touched a vulnerability I have carried quietly for years. Like many who write under the discipline of deadlines, I submit my pieces with urgency. Once sent to the editor, I rarely return to them. Writing, for me, has long been an act of release rather than refinement, an attempt to capture a thought before it dissolves. The slow labour of reworking has often seemed secondary to the pressure of articulation.
Sensing this unease, my brother gently suggested that I try having one of my pieces edited through artificial intelligence. I agreed out of curiosity rather than conviction, my scepticism intact. When the edited version arrived, I was struck by its clarity. The argument remained unchanged, the ideas unmistakably mine, yet the language moved with an ease that surprised me. Sentences no longer obstructed the thought they carried; they appeared to serve it. The experience was undeniably pleasing. Yet it also produced a deeper unease.
That unease lies not in the technology itself, but in what it may foreshadow. Artificial intelligence holds the potential to concentrate power in ways that delink consciousness from action, intention from responsibility, and agency from accountability. If such a trajectory unfolds, one must ask what would remain of human life half a century from now, particularly if accountability itself risks becoming obsolete. A world in which decisions are executed without moral authorship may be technologically........