A blitzkrieg of warnings about AI and its threat to civilisation has exploded across American and European media. Some of the most prominent figures in the industry and technology world are now calling for caution, regulation, even a slowdown. The warnings are no longer coming only from science-fiction writers or technology sceptics. Researchers inside AI companies have raised alarms about systems becoming increasingly difficult to control. The fears, they say, are not fictional.
As I was reading this ominous news at my farm one morning, I opened the newspaper with a steaming cup of freshly-brewed filter coffee in my hands. The morning sun was rising over the rain-washed trees. The fragrance of wet earth mingled with hay. Above me, two tiny sunbirds, like yellow puffs of cloud, were busy building a nest on a trumpet vine blazing with orange flowers. Every few minutes they flew in and out, carrying dried leaves, fine twigs and blades of grass.
Nearby hung another marvel: a weaver bird’s nest. It was an extraordinary piece of natural engineering, woven from long grass, with its entrance cleverly placed at the bottom. The sunbirds had chosen another design—the entrance at the top, protected by a little peak-like canopy.
Both nests were beautifully adapted to their purpose: protecting their young from predators and keeping them dry and warm when the monsoon clouds opened up.
I was suddenly carried away from the make-believe virtual world of the internet—and now the universe of artificial intelligence—into the real world of rain, sun, soil, wind, seasons and birds.
You may wonder, dear reader, if I am digressing. I am not.
My thoughts travelled back to my childhood and my village. We were a joint family. One evening, over dinner, my uncle told us a story. We had a few acres of arecanut garden on the picturesque banks of the Hemavathy. Our elderly neighbour kept a dozen buffaloes. They had discovered our garden and would regularly feast on our banana plants. Those without calves in the neighbour’s shed would practically move into our garden, day and night.
The complaints fell on deaf ears. So my father and his three brothers hatched a plan.
At midnight, they tied the buffaloes together and, under cover of darkness, drove the entire herd away—through thistles, nettles, slush and forest tracks—20 km into the forest. They walked back several kilometres, caught a bus and reached the village at dawn.
But when they returned to the garden that morning, there were the buffaloes, blissfully munching away at the banana plants.
They had found their way home. They had an inbuilt compass. I wondered then: how did the buffaloes know? And how did my uncles find their way back without GPS?
I remembered my Army days in the early 1970s, when we could be lost in a desert, jungle or mountain patrol even with maps and a compass. Yet local villagers and tribal guides seemed to possess an instinctive geography. During the 1971 war, it was often such local knowledge that led us through unfamiliar terrain. On a jungle safari in Africa or India, one sees the same instinct at work in guides who can read a trail almost invisible to the untrained eye.
Some knowledge cannot be downloaded. Some intelligence cannot be programmed. And some wisdom is acquired by living.
We were already beginning to lose our imagination and curiosity when computers and smartphones invaded our lives. We became captive to screens, algorithms and social media. AI has now arrived with even greater power—and perhaps an even greater danger: that we may gradually surrender not merely our memory, but our judgement, curiosity, imagination and sense of wonder.
More than 150 years ago, Ralph Waldo Emerson saw this coming. “Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts,” he wrote.
He observed that the civilised man had built a coach but lost the use of his feet; acquired a fine watch but forgotten how to tell the hour by the sun; possessed a nautical almanac but could not recognise a star. His notebooks impaired his memory. His libraries overloaded his wit. What a prescient warning.
AI may become the ultimate notebook, library, compass and assistant. But what happens when the assistant begins doing the thinking?
And what happens to our moral imagination when the machine can produce an image, a poem, a speech, a diagnosis, a strategy or a decision in seconds?
While we marvel at this technological revolution, the world continues to burn. Wars in Ukraine and West Asia have produced immense civilian suffering, even as our attention is increasingly mediated by screens and algorithms. The UN continues to document severe civilian casualties in Ukraine, while the devastation in Gaza following the October 7, 2023 attacks has been immense.
The paradox is striking. We have never possessed greater technological power—and yet we remain unable to prevent human beings from killing one another.
Perhaps Richard Feynman saw the dilemma most clearly. Speaking about the value of science, he recalled a Buddhist proverb he heard at a temple in Honolulu: “To every man is given the key to the gates of heaven; the same key opens the gates of hell.”
Feynman then asked what value such a key has if we do not know which gate is which. His answer was that we cannot throw away the key. We must learn how to use it.
AI is that key.
It can help us discover medicines, understand nature, educate millions and solve problems we cannot yet solve. But the same key can manipulate, deceive, surveil, destroy jobs, concentrate power—or perhaps, if the warnings prove justified, create risks we are not equipped to control.
The question is therefore not whether we should stop AI. The question is whether, in our intoxication with artificial intelligence, we are losing natural intelligence—our NI. The intelligence to wonder at two sunbirds building a nest. The intelligence to read the wind, the soil and the stars. The intelligence to remember a path home.
The intelligence to know when technology should serve humanity—and when humanity must say no. We need AI.
But we also need nature, beauty, love, laughter and the stubborn human capacity for wonder. We need bread and wine. We need poetry. We need the sunbirds. For man cannot live by AI alone.
G R Gopinath | Founder, Air Deccan; former Captain, Indian Army
(Views are personal)