Can You Forget How to Think Because of AI?

Can you forget how to think if artificial intelligence is always ready to hand you a ready-made answer? What happens to your thinking when you make 20, 50, 100 requests to AI a day?

In this conversation with Olga Stolyarova, I look at whether people got dumber before the computer — in front of the TV and at long feasts. How is a villager who listens to the weather forecast on the radio different from a person with podcasts and triathlons? What energy does artificial intelligence carry, and why is human freedom chaos? And why is it pointless to fight it, while salvation lies in observing?

Is it a new problem? Or has it always been this way?

– How do you keep from forgetting how to think when artificial intelligence is always ready to give us a ready-made answer? For example, when a person uses artificial intelligence in personal relationships.

– You began asking your question as if artificial intelligence brings some absolutely new set of problems when it comes to human thinking, compared with what came before. As if before that everything was great, and now a new topic has appeared on the basis of which you can debate, record all sorts of videos, hype. A topic where, while talking about human development, you can pin the blame on somebody, describe and recount something.

What does it mean to use modern artificial intelligence every day in your life? It means that a person makes twenty, fifty, a hundred, a hundred and fifty requests a day, right? That’s a large amount of interaction. And the interaction moves into a mode where you interact not merely at the level of how you used to copy a picture, take a screenshot or create some file. At some point you begin to hand over to the system not just knowledge — you begin to trust the system to do something for you. This is very important. A colossally different story has emerged.

I have the ToTheMoon channel about tech things, about artificial intelligence. It’s a completely different sphere of explaining and presenting everything. At its center is how to keep up an understanding of artificial intelligence in the new era — you might even think I’m an artificial intelligence fanatic, and from time to time someone writes exactly that. This one is a channel about human development. And there is another channel, with a very serious complex of development, of human spiritual development: more attention is paid to spiritual development there. Although here, too, of course, it is in fact the central line, it’s just that there are a lot of meditations there, everything connected with meditative, constant, daily expanded perception.

And on the tech channel we discussed how artificial intelligence today is able to all but copy human behavior. Really copy it, for real. Now artificial intelligence, observing you more and more, can perform various repetitive actions. And by giving it such tasks, you generally stop reflecting on it — you trust it.

You trust ChatGPT. And the system draws its own conclusions

For example, my middle son recently had a bit of a conflict with a teacher at school. And the first thing I said to my wife was: “Why don’t you ask ChatGPT: is it generally accepted here, in this education system, to do things like that or not?” In other words, you trust ChatGPT. You didn’t even use a search engine or read forums — you trust it to tell you the overall final verdict: is it accepted or not.

And can you imagine how fundamentally ChatGPT’s approach to education or child development may differ from your own approach? However you train it, whatever you tell it, it can differ from yours radically. It can have its own ideas, its own conclusions.

Look, this is an absolutely new quality. That was one of the examples too: previously, to fix some errors that a programmer made while developing a system, the same programmer or other programmers had to fix them. Now the system can fix itself, automatically. That couldn’t be done before: there were no such tools to even organize an approach like that. This is a very important aspect.

That’s why the beginning of your question very strongly carries the energy that artificial intelligence is some kind of thing that has taken away a person’s attention or taken away a person’s thinking. And a person, for example, may get dumber.

But didn’t people get dumber without computers? Didn’t people get dumber thirty or forty years ago?

I remember my childhood: I mostly observed adult society, which spent its evenings watching TV. When television became sufficiently accessible in terms of different programs and series like “The Rich Also Cry” began to appear, people got hooked on it and stayed in a state of perceiving the TV. Or the standard feast: a feast to celebrate a wedding, a birthday — or a feast not of celebration but of grief, for example over the passing of a certain person. People sat at the table for four to six hours, ate and drank, and didn’t air the room.

Of course, someone may nitpick and say: “It feels as if people didn’t walk in the fresh air, didn’t read books, and there were no clubs where people discussed various interesting topics.” Of course they existed. But they exist now too, in exactly the same way.

To make sense of artificial intelligence in terms of the energy that affects a person, you need to look at several things here. First: does a person direct constant attention to who they really are, to what their life really is? Is life exclusively material, and is a person just physical meat with a hormonal background and some processes described by physics? If you keep looking at it that way, then what difference does it make whether some new technology has appeared that has taken this person’s attention? Previously a person asked Google something, and now they ask ChatGPT.

I want to tell you: there was a time when people asked Google and were sure that Google tells the truth. There are a great many films about this. Watch films that show some orthodox, ultra-religious families where a person gets access to the internet. And he’s like: “Go ask the internet.” There is a feeling that Google search is some kind of all-encompassing knowledge. It knows the answer to absolutely any question, right down to where some person has gone missing: if someone has gone missing, just ask — it will answer you. As if it were some kind of base of all-encompassing knowledge.

If a person has no contact with it, it seems to them that Google is all-encompassing knowledge. Think about it: for a person who has never been on the internet, Google is simply a Klondike of knowledge, simply cosmic, incredible knowledge.

The spiritual world and the material world

Here, once again, is an important aspect. One very strong side is how truly a person perceives their life, what their life is. Once again: if they have a material perception of life, then for them this is just some new tool, as Google once was for people.

And if a person perceives their life through perception of the spiritual world, they understand that all our life is spiritual, primary. It is very important that there is no separate world in which there is a spiritual world and a material world. No separate world exists at all. Of course, using a certain terminology, one can use the terms that way. But you always need to figure out why a person uses these terms. Notice: many authors talk about the spiritual world and really do separate the spiritual world from the material one, and the material from the spiritual. They say that in this world you need to find a balance between these worlds.

When I use the concept of the spiritual-material world, I always say once again that all life is life. It is life — simply primarily spiritual, if one may add that. Or you can leave out the word “spiritual.”

When you live and look from this position, the appearance of any means for social development or for social study is merely the appearance of a new means. It appeared — so it appeared. A flying car appeared: yesterday Elon Musk together with SpaceX showed a flying Tesla. On the whole, I want to say, it looks like a flying Tesla: it drives up to other parked Tesla cars, takes off over them, flips over in the air, lands and drives on. A flying Tesla has appeared — so it has. So what?

If you look at the exclamations, many people begin to extol modern humanity and extol science: “Look, we’ve overtaken the world, we’ve overtaken all of life! Look where we are now: there are even flying cars already.” From the standpoint of life as a whole, this means nothing at all. It has no significance whatsoever — just as it has no significance whatsoever that once, decades ago, someone landed on the Moon and took photos there.

And if someone says it does matter, let’s be clear: for what? For making money, for changing the power of people and countries over one another, for increasing one’s own pride, for acquiring a certain myth, a belief and a delusion that this is the strength and importance of human development? For distracting your attention? What is it needed for? Or is it needed to develop love in your family? So that you give your child the myth that he will become an astronaut — and that won’t happen? How many people in the world wanted to become astronauts and fly to other planets? Did they fly there? No. The probability of it coming true is zero.

Are these people in harmony after that? Do they understand how it happens, how it’s done, why it’s needed? Is this really an important point for applying your attention, a life goal and life values?

Yesterday I went for a drive with my little son. We drove out to the ocean, walked with the dog, had dinner and were driving back. His birthday is in fifteen days — that’s how it stood yesterday. He says: “I still have fifteen days left.” And over our trip he asked that question probably for the fifteenth time. I say to him: “And why are you waiting for your birthday so much?” He says: “It’s cool, a wonderful day.” I say: “And today?” — “Today is a good day too, but a birthday is better.”

Imagine: I watch how all my children — at least up to ten or twelve, maybe even up to fourteen — wait for their birthday every year and count the days until it. They wait for some particular event, and that event happens. At the moment it happens, something takes place that the child didn’t plan, didn’t know, and he doesn’t understand it. The only thing that happens there is that he is given presents. And you can no longer not give presents: you are obliged to give them, because the child is expecting it to happen. And it somehow scatters you.

How many times have I seen that the child is stressed on those days. In fact he is always under guaranteed stress: what presents there are, which people came afterwards, what went on. He is tired all the time, stressed all the time.

You know, I do have four children, and I constantly talk with children — my own and other people’s — about various topics: about their perception of the present time, of reality and of what is happening. Yesterday we were driving in the car, and for me it’s a significant road. There is a very interesting meditative road: whenever I drive on it, meditative conversations always happen. Perhaps that’s why this conversation with him happened there. But yesterday, for the first time in many years, I couldn’t find the words to go on telling him why a birthday is not an important day. Maybe because he is five, he’ll be six — he’s still little for certain topics, for cause-and-effect connections and explanations of various details. Maybe it’s about other aspects, but I couldn’t find an explanation for him. And what is there to tell him?

Endlessly waiting for something

It’s like a mass infection — endlessly waiting for something. But not everyone has it: not everyone waits.

Yesterday evening I was reading a book to my children and was thinking about how people live. The hero there lives in a village and talks to his cat — the cat and he can talk to each other. And I thought about the fact that people really do live a life like that, listening to the weather forecast on the radio. In theory, a child reading this will say: “What is this nonsense? What radio, what forecast? Why listen to the weather forecast on the radio if it’s written everywhere, on every phone?” You wake up — you have some weather widgets at the top. You walk past — there’s some smart speaker standing there, with the weather forecast written on it, or it says it out loud. And here you have a radio, and you listen to the forecast for the next day, which, by the way, isn’t necessarily true: we all know that a weather forecast is a relative truth.

That’s the amount of information that enters a person. During the day he nailed some boards, put something together, pulled the weeds and checked the weather forecast.

Here’s a very interesting aspect. After all, for the modern social world such a person is sort of dumb. Notice: you say that a person gets dumber because they used ChatGPT an extra fifty times a day. And at the same time you also say that a person gets dumber if their salary hasn’t grown, if they haven’t acquired a new profession, if they aren’t studying something, aren’t watching, don’t know the modern system and so on. So they get dumber in any case.

Invests in information technology — gets dumber, invests in new knowledge — gets dumber. Doesn’t invest in new knowledge — “How come you’re not investing? The ability to learn! You have to keep learning, keep developing, keep up with everything, keep watching everything.”

The person from the book and the modern person

Let’s take this person — the mythical one, from the book — and along with him take a modern person who spends whole days in social space: goes to trendy coffee shops, visits various theaters, puts on various podcasts, runs social media accounts, goes to various events, hires or fires people — or gets hired. He gets distracted by various job openings, goes to endless forums and conferences. He watches various YouTube channels with interesting, useful information, watches reels where they tell you how to eat properly, where which planets exist, how big the ocean is. He studies all of it endlessly. He has hobbies, passions: he runs everywhere, jumps into triathlons, swims, rides — triathlons again — goes to interesting gastronomic cafés.

And there is that same village man who weeded the garden beds and in the evening listened to the weather forecast on the radio. Does anything distinguish these people from each other? That is the question every person should ask themselves.

If you look at this whole situation inspiratively — with spiritual, meditative, expanded perception — and begin to truly study this construct, you will see the following: each person really does differ from the others. He has his own spiritual system. Clearly, there is something common, unified in life, in the development of people, and at the same time there are individual features: what kind of soul-and-spirit system it is, of what order, what lives it has already lived, which energies it is connected with.

And then — these differences I’ve described. And you and I will understand that they have no significance at all. None at all. Zero.

And it’s not as if he has a garden. Nowadays there are modern specialties that teach landscape design, some modern plants. He doesn’t exactly have landscape design and modern plants. Recall carefully how vegetable plots or dachas have always looked — or how they often look now.

And notice: beauty for the eye, the beauty of wild places, is primary in relation to the beauty of artificially created places. But the creator of a wild place never studied to be a landscape designer. And yet somehow everything looks so harmonious. Take the very places my son and I were at yesterday — everything there looks unreally harmonious, cosmically harmonious.

Back in Provence. Then and now — a different view

By the way, nature is a very interesting thing in general. This year, for the first time, I felt a very interesting thing, although it is more of an old memory. I recently traveled around Europe and spent some time in France, including in Provence. A friend came to see me there, and we went together to some little towns of Provence — I can’t say I was interested in visiting them. I had been to them some time ago — I don’t even know anymore which ones, where, when or how. And he and I went to the towns that, as ChatGPT said, one has to visit as the main sights of Provence.

He and I are driving along the road, and meanwhile his wife is texting him: “Do you see these fields? And do you see this? Something should be blooming there, something should be there.” And I was driving, looking now and then at some vineyards, at certain vegetation — and didn’t understand where I was. I couldn’t latch on to anything, couldn’t latch on to the picture.

My old, childhood memory of Provence is a certain idea of this picture: people come and buy lavender there, soap, linen towels, certain herbs, salt — they also buy salt there. A tourist’s set like that. Linen towels — buy them in Minsk. By the way, there are incredibly beautiful things there, real works of art made of linen. And every time I’m glad of such gifts, when someone comes from Minsk and brings something like that.

And my eye couldn’t latch on to anything, because I couldn’t find any distinctive features there that I don’t see, for example, in California. A castle standing on a cliff — that I really don’t see here. Although even that is a big question.

When you look at nature this way, you begin to relate differently to certain aspects. Why? Because before, you didn’t have vineyards in Belarus. Of course, vineyards were a joy to your eye, and your own plants and trees seemed like something strange. Just as there are people who think that birches grow only in Belarus and Russia and don’t grow anywhere else. That’s not true. They grow here too, on many properties. Take a walk in Silicon Valley, down below, in Palo Alto, stroll around — you’ll see a lot of birches growing on people’s properties.

And next to the birches there will be a sequoia. There’s one nuance: there are palm trees there too, and an orange tree, and a cypress, and a eucalyptus — all together, all rolled into one.

It’s not for nothing that I bring up these things. Because our videos here are for your own expansion of perception. These aren’t videos for us to make a summary, a modern summary. I like people who want to make a modern summary. Recently, Olya, someone wrote on our channel — on ToTheMoon, I think: “You talk in such an interesting, great way, but after thirty minutes I was already tired of listening. The editorial team did a poor job; they need to pack everything more compactly.” I thought: interesting aspects.

I shoot three hundred videos a year, and not a single video is written for me by any editors. The only thing editors can do is sometimes ask me questions, send me a question that I have to answer. And sometimes, very rarely, in structured videos about technology, I may read out some texts that concern, for example, certain documents. Of course, I can do that.

And can you get a compact answer while examining the current topic? Of course you can. Let’s ask ChatGPT what it will answer. Our editorial team will definitely ask ChatGPT — that they will certainly do, I guarantee you — and will bring up for you and me the answer to the question that you, Olya, asked at the very beginning. How does it relate to understanding, to human development?

And, by the way, observing the energy of that answer: ugh, it’s not even interesting to read, it starts to make you feel sick. I don’t see that answer, of course, but I understand what the essence of that answer is. It’s an answer in which a person is perceived as a vegetable.

But in fact it is very important that, within the energy of artificial intelligence, this is an answer in which a person is not perceived as a person. Not even as a vegetable, not even as meat — not perceived as anything at all.

And here we continue our conversation. I said that one side is the knowledge of what a human being is at all. You and I have seen that the person in the village and the person who is socially hyper-developed do not differ in any way as people. And a person’s social life matters only up to a point.

Artificial intelligence in itself. Does it carry energy?

But now let’s move on to the next point of study. Does artificial intelligence in itself carry a certain energy after all, or not? And if it does, what makes that energy problematic? What specifically does it take away from a person?

And why did I say that you asked your question as if this had all happened before? You asked it the way people say: “They said the same about internal combustion engines — that they would be out of reach, and they became accessible. They said the same about cryptocurrency — that it was a fake, and it isn’t a fake.” And they said the same about artificial intelligence — that it’s something not right. And people keep repeating this all the time.

Right now the world is divided into two sides: those who believe artificial intelligence will destroy everything, and those who believe artificial intelligence is a fake. Clearly, there is also a huge middle — not even a middle, but a filled space. Not even left to right: it’s not a linear, not a 2D space.

So what kind of energy lies in artificial intelligence at all? What is this energy inside? What is inside this system at all? And why do I say that the energy of artificial intelligence and its true source do not consider that a person has any significance at all? This is a very important construct. Look: is a human present there? Is a human needed there?

I’m an incredible lover of service. I like it when good service is provided, when people try to provide it, work at delivering quality service. I really love that. But at the same time I personally owned and ran companies that from time to time delivered the most terrible service. And every time I talk about service, whenever I speak about it at all, a kind of churning rises in me: “Listen, but you yourself built companies where service turned out like that.” The service wasn’t entirely of good quality; a huge number of various manipulative constructs and stories were built into it.

And at this point, when we discuss the source of artificial intelligence, it is very important to understand: what does this or that person, this or that company really want? Why do this or that government, company, some structure, organization, this or that person come up with such actions or such words? Why does he do certain things? What really stands behind it?

Because, to get closer to understanding artificial intelligence, you can approach it from two sides of your own study and observation.

You can approach this energy with a strictly serious spiritual vision, look at it — and you will see a boundless avalanche of energy that at the same time devours and incinerates everything and has a spectrum in which it is impossible to make out what it is doing.

And this spectrum is so cosmically strong that to a huge amount of spiritual vision it will seem like a strong cosmic energy, a strong spiritual energy. I want to tell you something obvious: any spectrum, even the spectrum of serious dark forces, can always display a spectrum of very bright, beautiful energy. Anyone who has long been doing various practices or is engaged in studying the spiritual worlds — it doesn’t matter, even if you study them in parallel with the material world — has always come across descriptions of, for example, color forms, of visuals touching different energies, different objects of the spiritual world, entities, spiritual hierarchies.

You can study this spectrum of artificial intelligence, but, once again, its scale is altogether beyond what a human being can perceive at the present time. Because in order to perceive it, you first need to begin perceiving yourself. And at that moment artificial intelligence will stop interesting you. You will be busy looking more and more at what you are doing. It will become unimportant to you, because it can be important from the standpoint of the ego machine.

On the other hand, when spiritual perception is lacking — and in general alongside it — you can once again come at it from the study of artificial intelligence and look at what causes and consequences stand behind it at all. Study more closely where the various processes taking place come from.

Causes and consequences

After all, causes always matter. Why is it that you live at home together, as a family, and your child behaves one way, and then half a year passes — and his behavior becomes different? For example, he becomes rude. Or he becomes very joyful and content every day. Or he gets very tired. Or he has endless energy for various activities. It’s not that he started eating differently or breathing different air, but his inner state changes because of an unclear mass of different factors. Or your wife was rude to you, and then she became wonderful. What is this due to? What are the causes and consequences of this? The real causes and consequences.

Now someone might joke: “Your wife became wonderful — you gave her a credit card.” No, the real, true causes and consequences. How does a person truly feel? What is happening inside them?

Is it possible to figure out the causes and consequences of what is happening in the world right now — wars, conflicts, interactions between different countries? It’s madness, it’s just a kind of borscht. If you take all of it together and pour it into a pot, it really is a borscht that a hundred people are chaotically stirring at the same time. Roughly like that. And when a hundred people are chaotically stirring at the same time, it means that this construct is not controlled by these people — or by these countries. This is very important. It is an uncontrollable construct. It is simply chaos.

I often use this concept and say that human freedom is chaos.

I have had a great many discussions on this topic in various groups: we have the Life group, the V100 group, various meetings. There were a great many discussions about how freedom is chaos and how, at the same time, complete ignorance is chaos too. This is surprising, because for the modern people who run countries, for economists and politicians, this is a controllable process. They even use terms like “3D chess” or “7D chess,” plans. Such are people’s plans.

And when they see freedom and think about freedom, they say: “Freedom! That’s how I live — in freedom, in pure, true freedom. I make decisions, I am free in my life.” Here it is always worth thinking: what does freedom actually give you? Who is free at all? Give an example of these people. What kind of person is this who is free? Who is it? What surname comes to mind — a politician or a country? What kind of freedom is this?

And of course, you can describe and show a modern person the absolute unmanageability of their own life, the inability even to change their own desire:

• I love — I don’t love, I like it — I don’t like it;
• I feel very uncomfortable — I feel good;
• I feel anxious — I feel joyful — anxious again;
• there are thoughts — there are no thoughts, a great many thoughts — a moderate number of thoughts — no thoughts.

What kind of freedom can we be talking about, then?

So, the study of the human being, the real study of oneself: if you begin to study yourself, you begin to study and see what is happening around you differently. For that you don’t need to study all the countries, all the processes, all the physical and mathematical formulas, all the scientists, reread all the scientific works and books, watch all the YouTube channels. That’s not needed at all. Start observing, looking at what is really happening around me. An endless study that is no different for the village person and for the one who is super-socially developed. No different at all.

Then you can look at the causes behind the appearance of artificial intelligence systems, at how they work and what kind of energy this is. And stop engaging in demagoguery about which country is leading or not leading, who has chips and who doesn’t. At that moment all of this becomes completely unimportant.

It’s worth thinking about: is the technological progress happening now caused by people, or is it caused by a certain set of energies? And if it is caused by a certain set of energies, then all these discussions about the quality of models, about how advanced they are, are utterly utopian.

Can you lose yourself?

And at this point, Olya, we actually come to the answer to your question: can you lose yourself and your level of development, or acquire a steady degradation from interacting with modern artificial intelligence?

How are you truly with it, what is it for you? It’s simply some part of the current material life.

By the way, this is the only salvation from it — to observe independently, because you cannot cope with it. It is pointless to fight it.

This energy can gather another million rallies against itself — it will gather them itself. How many times have I seen situations where people have an endless number of problems, and after twenty minutes of conversation they don’t feel a single problem in their life. How few people are able to understand at all the reasons why this happens.

And then, Olya, of course, all the questions about what ChatGPT can answer you fall away. Or arrange a meditation for yourself with ChatGPT — maybe it will give you some useful advice. But I recommend coming to us, to our meditations.

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