I am a huge Mission: Impossible fan. Dangerous heists, ball gowns, gun fights. There’s something about those derring-dos that really gets me going. I have watched all the movies more times than I can count. So when Dead Reckoning: Part One arrived in theaters in July 2023, I went to see it. I wasn’t sure what to expect. After all, both the franchise and its star are getting up there. I was afraid the writers would use this movie’s nemesis to end Ethan Hunt for good and pass the baton onto someone else or end the series altogether, so I put a pack of tissues in my dress pocket just in case. To my surprise, the enemy they chose for this movie wasn’t human at all. It was an AI cyber-weapon (“The Entity”) that had become sentient and was now killing the people it was supposed to help. Super scary. What was even more scary, though, were the murderous lengths that certain characters were willing to go to to control or make deals with The Entity, to use it for their own benefit against others. Didn’t end up needing all of those tissues, but it did get me thinking.

One of the most remarkable things about human beings is our ability to create. We do not passively consume our environments; we take them and invent new ones. We mainly do this with tools. Fire. Spears. Plows. Engines. Computers. Most stories about AI or robots feed the fear we have of becoming tools of our tools. They either make things so easy that we fall into a mindless stupor and forget how to be humans (think Wall-e) or they become so smart that they mutate into quasi-humans (think M3GAN). The reality of the situation, though, is probably more like Dead Reckoning - a tool in the hands of those who seek to use it for the wrong reasons regardless of the consequences causes bad things, regardless of how benign or well-intentioned the tool was to begin with.

The premise of the question “Is AI making us stupid, or just smarter in unexpected ways?” gives AI so much more agency than it truly has. Artificial intelligence, for all its marvels, is not a sentient being (not yet, anyway). It cannot make humans do anything or be anything. It is up to us, both as individuals and as a collective, to decide how much we use it and what we use it for. If we decide to use AI as a way to inspire us, to streamline our thoughts so that we can make way for new ones, then we will probably become smarter. If we decide to use AI as a replacement for human thought, feeding it prompts and then absorbing whatever it says with no critical analysis or thought of our own, then we will probably become more stupid. The long-term consequences remain to be seen, but we are still in control and the choices we make now will affect the future of humanity.

AI is not just a productivity tool, it is also a creative one that is changing the way we work and how we interact with online information. We can’t put the cat back in the box, so we should adapt to this new technology by teaching the next generation of online users to tell the difference between human and artificial intelligence, to use AI ethically, and to consider its benefits and the risks as technology develops. It's still early days. We still have a chance to make good choices before the distinction between human and machine becomes indistinguishable.

And if it all goes to shit…there’s always the library.