The Real Long-Term Threat to Israel (and Humanity)

It makes a lot of sense for Israelis to be focusing on its current (and hopefully soon behind us?) existential crisis with our “neighbors.” Unfortunately, that prevents us from seeing the real existential threat in the foreseeable future: Artificial Intelligence.

No, I’m not talking about AI “Taking Over the World!” as some screaming headlines would have you believe. The chances of AI becoming truly “conscious” with its own “drive” and self-interest are close to zero – at least until we start producing AI based on biological materials (DNA computing already exists in rudimentary form). The real threat is far more insidious – and strikes particularly hard at what makes Israel great.

Here’s some well-known background: throughout modern history, what has made the Jewish People stand out is their intellectual firepower. As but one example among many: with only 0.25% (a quarter of one percent) of the world’s population, Jews have garnered 18% of all the science Nobel Prizes – that’s 72 times their global proportion! The Talmud – a gigantic compendium of acutely argued discussions – is but the leading source of such cogitative abilities.

So it’s not surprising that “tiny Israel” punches way above its puny population numbers on the world stage: scientifically, technologically, economically, politically, and even culturally (e.g., 4 Eurovision victories). In the modern “Information Age,” brainpower is the key to success – individual and national.

Here’s where AI enters the picture. As a researcher of AI (I published the first ever academic article on the legal aspects of AI – back in 1981!), I am keenly aware of its potential (and already real) benefits. But as a professor of college students, I also clearly see the inherent “intellectual” problem: the more students rely on AI, the less they’re learning/training to do actual thinking by and for themselves. Imagine someone telling you that s/he is exercising and strengthening their muscles by sending their personal robot to the physical fitness gym to lift weights for them! Patently absurd. But there’s no difference between “exercising” one’s body muscles and brain muscles; in both cases, it’s a case of “use it or lose it.”

Indeed, recent neurological research has actually shown this happening within the brain. Students were split into three groups: 1) on a given topic, writing an essay all by themselves; 2) using Google Search to find sources and then writing that essay; 3) providing their AI with instructions to write an essay on the same subject. The results: far more brain connections in the first group than the third (with the second in the middle); the third group had trouble recalling almost anything in “their” essay; the first group was able to recollect almost everything those students wrote by themselves.

What happens when using AI becomes the standard tool for getting through college (or even high school)? In short: the dumbing down of society. That might not be a tragedy for a country’s workforce that relies on muscle power (agriculture or factory work). But for an economy that relies mostly on brainpower, it could be potentially devastating economically – ergo, the dire threat to Israel’s future economic success.
Universities around the world are breaking their head to adapt to this new situation. The professors and administrative staff understand full well the danger lurking in overuse of AI in the students’ studies (note the similarity in these two words). Unfortunately, the students are far less aware of such cognitive injury. My personal “mantra” to my students has always run along these lines: “WHAT you study is far less important than HOW you study it. College is your personal Olympics: “No Pain, No Gain.”

Critical and creative thinking is what students should be doing; not memorizing facts. That was true “back then”; it’s far truer today in the Age of AI where our intellectual tool does that kind of “source work” much better than any human being is capable of. What humans do better than AI is to come up with creative questions to ask the AI to try and answer; to think about whether (and to what extent) the AI’s results make sense; and how to apply the AI’s results in the real world (AI’s Achilles Heel: it doesn’t “live” in the physical world, but merely in the textual world of the vast internet).

What’s a professor to do with students? For that matter, what’s a hiring manager to ask entry job candidates? Forget about grades based on fact regurgitation. Instead, we should all switch our perspective to testing critical/creative thinking, perhaps even without numerical grades but rather through qualitative evaluations.
For Israel’s continued technological-scientific-economic success, it won’t be enough to stay in place intellectually. After all, with the rest of the world adopting AI, other nations will constitute a greater competitive threat in the future (unless they too “dumb down” their own workforce). Once again, we will have to use our considerable brainpower to find the way to stay ahead of the pack: AI and human together.