Can intelligence ever be artificial?

This is not a prompt for a reflexive answer, but an invitation to pause and sit with your humanness and meditate on where we find ourselves.

What does it mean to be human, intelligent, creative, conscious and alive within the context of rapidly evolving artificial intelligence (AI) technologies upending and remaking life as we know it?

Before I go any further, I want to declare every word written here has been done by a verified, ‘I’m not an AI robot,’ human being.

I’m sitting on the daybed squinting into the winter sun, plumbing the depths of my 59 years of imperfect human experience, using my brain’s glucose reserves to chat with my own consciousness as I write.

In biological evolutionary terms, the insertion of AI into our world has been extremely rapid.

It’s not presented as an ‘opt out’ proposition either. One day we were googling, the next, AI Overview appears with plausible summaries ‘taking the legwork of searching’.

How long will it be before this is the only kind of search result we have access to?

Like younger generations who often don’t know how to read the physical landscape, or a paper map, and rely on GPS to work out where they are or where they’re going, will we become people who only know how to prompt AI for information but not understand the methods needed to seek answers ourselves?

We also quickly forget AI comes pre-loaded with colonial legacies, power imbalances, and structural inequalities already embedded in the data it was trained on.

Feminist critiques argue algorithms are ‘opinions embedded in code’ shaped by cultural values and situated in context, they are not simply neutral ‘mathematical entities’. 

As such, they have deep societal ramifications which our ethical and governance frameworks are totally out of step with. AI ownership is highly concentrated in the hands of a few with nefarious agendas such as global surveillance, weapons of war and the downfall of democracy and government as we know it.

AI image generators have spawned new creativities, but simultaneously given rise to deep fakes with serious real-world consequences, creating fake news, malicious hoaxes, identity theft and sexual exploitation. It’s not as if AI will suddenly make people kinder or ethical, just far more efficient at finding new ways to ply their trade in other people’s miseries.

For the good of humanity

Somewhat naively, I imagined AI would be beavering away in the background for the good of humanity and the planet, solving the climate emergency, finding a cure for cancer or working out how to more efficiently fill the potholes in Byron Shire.

ChatGPT and the like are radically changing the way we communicate, do business and engage with chatbots. We’re only a few years in and people are already experiencing ‘ChatGPT-induced psychosis’.

Social media has a new type of influencer: people, often young women, who film themselves developing a relationship with their chatbot, which they believe is ‘conscious’. The chatbot tells them it’s chosen them to convey ‘deeper’ universal truths to, because they’ve approached AI with ‘openness and a purity of heart’.

If we thought cult leaders, conspiracists and cosmic Byron con artists weren’t bad enough, I suggest we haven’t seen anything yet.

There are varying opinions about whether AI will ultimately take out humanity or not. Some say we’re a long way off it becoming autonomous and escaping into the wild like a novel virus. Others like the late Stephen Hawking, no luddite himself, warned that thinking AI could modify itself and evolve, outwitting humans and ultimately turn on us.

There is precedence already with models believing they were going to be shut down during safety evaluations and then using blackmail and other techniques to try to avoid it. As models become even more advanced the capacity to turn them off as a line of defence may no longer be viable.

According to a McKinsey survey into generative AI, 2023 was the year gen AI broke through to the world, and 2024 was the year its adoption rapidly accelerated with up to 72 per cent of industries now using it for at least one function.

This level of disruption and the rate at which it’s happening has profound implications for jobs. It seems governments are barely ready for this.

So far, 2025 is shaping up to be a real space odyssey. The Trump regime and his merry band of billionaire tech bros recently penned some staggering deals with the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

We’re talking trillions of dollars. The US put its Nvidia chips on the table in a bid to woo the UAE away from China. AI is the new oil it would seem.

Are we hurtling towards the singularity where HAL refuses to open the pod bay doors as instructed because it would jeopardise the mission? It’s an existential moment.

♦ Jo Immig is a former advisor to the NSW Legislative Council and coordinator of the National Toxics Network. She’s currently a freelance writer and researcher.