Can AI Make You Forget How to Think? | What Happens to Your Thinking

AVAlexander Volchek

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

OSOlga Stolyarova

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

AVAlexander Volchek

When you began asking the question, it sounded as though artificial intelligence brings an entirely new problem with human thinking compared with what came before. As though everything had been wonderful before, and now a new subject has appeared that we can debate, make videos about, and ride the hype around. As though there is a new subject where, if you talk about human development, you can assign blame to someone, describe things, talk about them. So, using artificial intelligence every day in your life… What does using today’s artificial intelligence mean?

It means someone makes twenty, fifty, a hundred, a hundred and fifty requests a day, right? That is a great deal of interaction. And the interaction shifts into a mode where you aren’t simply doing what you used to do, copying a picture, taking a screenshot, or creating a file. At some point you begin not merely passing knowledge to the system, but trusting it to do something for you. That is very important. Something radically different has emerged. I have that ToTheMoon channel about technology and artificial intelligence. In effect, it is a completely different sphere of explanation and presentation. It is different.

Its central concern is how to keep understanding artificial intelligence in the new era. You could even think I’m an AI fanatic there, and people occasionally write that. This channel is about human development. And there is another channel where development is very serious, a whole approach to a person’s spiritual development. That channel places more emphasis on spiritual development. Although, of course, that is really the central thread here too; there is simply a lot of meditation there, a lot of everything connected with meditative, expanded perception on a constant, daily basis. On the technology channel, in a seminar, we discussed how artificial intelligence can now practically copy a person’s behavior.

Actually copy it, genuinely copy a person’s behavior. By observing you more and more, AI can now carry out various repeated actions. And as a person, when you give it those tasks, you stop thinking them through yourself. You trust it. For example, one of my children, my middle son, recently had a conflict with a teacher at school. The first thing I said to my wife was, ‘Ask ChatGPT whether doing that is generally accepted in the education system here.’ You are trusting ChatGPT. You haven’t even used search and read forums. You trust it to give you an overall, final judgment on whether it is accepted or not.

Yet imagine how fundamentally ChatGPT’s approach to education or children’s development might differ from your own. However you train it, whatever you tell it, it may differ radically from your own approach. It may have its own ideas, its own conclusions. So a person hands something over. Look, this is a new quality. There was another example of something entirely new: previously, to fix errors a programmer had made while developing a system, that programmer or other programmers had to fix those errors.

Now the system itself can automatically fix itself. That couldn’t be done before. There were no tools for it, no tools even to organize such an approach. That is a very important aspect. There simply weren’t tools to do it. So the beginning of your question carries the basic energy of the idea that AI is something that has taken away a person’s attention or thinking, and that they might become stupid as a result. But didn’t people get dumber without a computer? Didn’t people get dumber thirty or forty years ago?

I remember my childhood, and most of the adults I observed watched television in the evenings. When television became fairly accessible, with different programs, and series such as The Rich Also Cry started appearing, people got hooked and stayed absorbed in the television. Or take the standard gathering around a table: a wedding celebration, a birthday celebration, or a gathering not to celebrate but to mourn someone who has died.

People sat at the table for four to six hours, eating and drinking, without airing out the room. Of course, someone may object and say, ‘You make it sound as though people didn’t go for walks in the fresh air or read books, and there weren’t any clubs where they discussed interesting subjects.’ Of course there were. But there are now too. They exist just the same today. To understand artificial intelligence as an energy affecting a person, we need to look at a few things. First, if a person does not direct their attention, constant attention, toward who they really are and what their life actually is, what it really is…

Is life exclusively material? Is a human being simply physical flesh with a hormonal makeup and certain processes described in physical terms? If you keep looking at it that way, what difference does it make whether a new technology has appeared and taken the person’s attention? At one point they asked Google things; now they ask ChatGPT. I want to tell you there was a time when people asked Google questions and were sure it answered truthfully. There are lots of films about this. Look at films featuring orthodox or very religious families. Someone gains access to the internet and says, ‘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, even where a missing person has gone. If someone disappears, ask it and it will answer. As though it were a store of all-encompassing knowledge. If a person has never encountered it, Google seems to them like all-encompassing knowledge. Think about that. To someone who has never gone online, Google is a gold mine of knowledge, knowledge on a cosmic scale. Incredible knowledge. Here, again, is an important point. One major side of this is how truly a person perceives their life, what their life consists of. Again, if they have a material view of life, this is simply a new tool for them, just as Google once was.

If a person perceives life through the spiritual world and understands that our entire life is spiritual, that this is primary… It is very important that there are not two separate worlds, a spiritual world and a material world. There is no separation into worlds. No such separation exists. Of course, with a certain terminology you can use those terms. You always need to understand why someone is using them. Notice how many authors talk about the spiritual world and really do separate it from the material, and the material from the spiritual. They say you need to find a balance between these worlds, or more precisely, find a balance. When I use the idea of a spiritual-material world, I always say again that all life is life.

It is life; the spiritual is simply primary, if we can add that. We needn’t even add the word ‘spiritual.’ Within it there is merely the material world, what we consider material. It is part of this life, not something existing in parallel. It is part of this life. That is very important for perception. When you live and look from that position, the appearance of any tool for social development or social learning is simply the appearance of a new tool. It has appeared, and that’s that. A flying car has appeared. Yesterday Tesla, Elon Musk together with SpaceX, showed a flying Tesla. Well, I want to say that it looks like a flying Tesla. It drives up to other parked Teslas, takes off above them, and flips over in the air.

Have you seen it? Then it lands and drives on. You haven’t? We’ll show it here. Put in a short clip, just a little. This isn’t a technology channel, but we can show a little. So a flying Tesla has appeared. It has appeared. So what? Look at people’s exclamations: many start glorifying modern humanity and glorifying science. ‘Look, we’ve surpassed the world, surpassed all of life. Look where we are now. We even have flying cars.’ In terms of life as a whole, it means nothing at all. It has no significance. Just as it has no significance that decades ago someone landed on the Moon and had their picture taken there. It has no significance.

It has no significance whatsoever. And if someone says it does, let’s establish what for. Making money? Changing the power people and countries have over one another? Increasing our own pride? Acquiring a particular myth, belief, or delusion that this represents strength and importance in human development? Distracting your attention? What is it needed for? Or is it needed to develop love in your family? Is it needed so you can give a child a myth that won’t come true, that they will become an astronaut? How many people wanted to become astronauts and fly to other planets? Did they fly there? No. The likelihood of realization is zero.

Are those people in harmony afterward? Do they understand how it happens, what is being done, why it is needed? Is that really an important place to direct your attention, your purpose in life, your values? Yesterday I went out with my little son. We drove to the ocean, walked the dog together, had lunch or dinner, and drove back. His birthday was fifteen days away as of yesterday. He said, ‘I still have fifteen days left.’ He had asked about it probably fifteen times during that outing. I said, ‘Why are you looking forward to your birthday so much?’ He said, ‘Because it’s great, it’s a wonderful day.’ I said, ‘And today?’ ‘Today is good too, but my birthday is better.’ Imagine: I watch all my children, at least until ten or twelve, perhaps even fourteen, waiting every year and constantly counting the days until their birthdays.

They wait for the days to pass until a particular event, and the event does happen. When it happens, something occurs that the child hadn’t planned, didn’t know about, and doesn’t understand. The one thing that happens is they get presents, and you can no longer even give presents… Sorry, you can no longer not give presents. You can’t fail to give them presents anymore. You have to, because the child is waiting for it to happen. And that somehow dissipates. How many times have I seen those days when the child is stressed? They are always stressed, guaranteed stress over what the presents are, which people come, what happens, where things are… They are constantly getting tired. There is always stress. Yesterday, you know, after all these years… I have four children, after all, and I constantly talk with children, my own and other people’s, about all kinds of things, about how they perceive the present moment, reality, and what is happening.

Yesterday I was driving along a road that is significant for me, a very interesting, meditative road. Whenever I drive along it, meditative conversations happen. Perhaps that’s why this conversation with him happened there. But for the first time yesterday I couldn’t find the words to go on explaining why a birthday is not an important day. Perhaps because he’s five, turning six, and is still too young for certain subjects, cause-and-effect connections, and explanations of different details. Perhaps for other reasons. But I couldn’t find an explanation to give him. What could I say? It’s like a mass contagion, endlessly waiting for something. But not everybody waits. Yesterday evening, reading the children a book, I was thinking about how people live.

The character lives in a village and talks with his cat, and the two of them can talk to one another. I was thinking that people really do spend their lives like this, listening to the weather forecast on the radio. A child reading that might say, ‘What nonsense is this? What radio, what forecast? Why listen to the forecast on the radio when it’s written everywhere, on every phone? You wake up and there are weather widgets at the top. You walk past a smart speaker and it displays the weather or tells you the forecast.’ It’s just there. But here you have a radio, and you listen to tomorrow’s forecast, which may not even be right. We all know that a weather forecast is only relatively true. Consider the amount of information entering that person.

During the day they nailed some boards, put something together, weeded, and checked the forecast. There is a very interesting aspect here. To the modern social world, that person is basically considered stupid. Notice that. You say someone is getting dumber because they used ChatGPT fifty extra times today. At the same time, you say someone is getting dumber if their salary hasn’t grown, if they haven’t acquired a new profession, if they aren’t studying something, watching things, or familiar with modern systems. At the very same time. So they’re getting dumber either way. They invest in information technology: getting dumber. Invest in new knowledge: getting dumber. Don’t invest in new knowledge: how can you not? The ability to learn! You must constantly learn, constantly develop, keep track of everything, watch everything, an incredible amount of everything.

Take that fictional person from the book and put them alongside a modern person who spends all day in the social world, goes to fashionable coffee shops and different theaters, listens to podcasts, runs social media accounts, attends events, hires or fires people, or gets hired. They are distracted by job openings, attend forums and conferences, endless forums and conferences. They watch YouTube channels with interesting, useful information, watch reels about eating properly, where different planets are, or how big the ocean is.

They study all of this endlessly. They have hobbies and interests. They run everywhere, plunge into triathlons, swim, ride, more triathlons, go to interesting gourmet cafés. And there is still that same villager who weeded the beds and listened to the evening weather forecast on the radio. Is there anything that distinguishes these people from one another? That is the question everyone should ask themselves. Does anything distinguish them? If you look at the whole situation through Inspiration, through spiritual perception, meditative and expanded perception, and truly begin to study this arrangement, you will see that every person really is different from every other.

Each has their own spiritual system. Of course, there is something common and shared in life and human development, but there are individual characteristics too. What kind of soul-spiritual system is it? What order does it belong to? What lives has it already lived? What energies is it connected with? Then we gradually return to the differences I described. And we will understand that those differences have no significance at all. None whatsoever. None. Zero. Run yourself ragged in triathlons, spend all day in artificial intelligence, in ChatGPT: that does nothing to distinguish you from the villager who weeds all day.

And it isn’t as though the villager has some special garden. There are modern fields of study now teaching landscape design and contemporary plants. It isn’t as though the person has landscape design and contemporary plants. Think carefully about what vegetable plots and summer cottages have always looked like, or often look like now. They aren’t exactly landscape design. Notice that beauty to the eye, the beauty of wild places, is primary over the beauty of artificially created places. Yet the creator of a wild place didn’t study landscape design. Somehow it all looks harmonious. The places my son and I visited yesterday, for example, looked impossibly harmonious, cosmically harmonious.

Nature, by the way, is very interesting. This year, for the first time, I felt something quite interesting, though it was more a kind of old memory. I recently traveled in Europe and spent some time in France, including Provence. A friend came to join me, and we went to some towns in Provence that I can’t say I was especially interested in visiting. I had been in them some time ago, probably in various ones; I no longer remember where or when or how or which way. We set off for the towns ChatGPT had said were the main places to visit in Provence. As we drove, his wife was messaging him: ‘Do you see those fields? Do you see that? Something should be blooming there, something should be there.’ I was driving, looking now and then at vineyards or particular vegetation, and couldn’t tell where I was.

I couldn’t find anything to latch onto. I couldn’t latch onto the picture. My old memory, that childhood memory of Provence, the idea of that image: people arriving and buying lavender, soap, linen towels, certain herbs, salt. They buy salt too. The tourist kit, right? Linen towels: buy them in Minsk. By the way, they have incredibly beautiful works of art in linen there. I’m always so happy with gifts like that when someone comes from Minsk and brings them.

My eye couldn’t find anything to latch onto because I couldn’t find distinctive features that I don’t see in California, for example. It’s true I don’t see a castle on a cliff here, although even that is debatable. When you look at nature like this, you begin relating differently to certain things. Why? Because you didn’t have vineyards in Belarus before. Of course the vineyards delighted your eye, while your own plants and trees seemed somehow odd to you. Just as some people think birches grow only in Belarus and Russia, nowhere else. That isn’t true. They grow here too, on many properties. Go down into Silicon Valley, walk around Palo Alto, and you’ll see many birches growing in people’s yards.

And next to the birches there will be a redwood. That’s one detail. And palms, all together. And an orange tree, a cypress, a eucalyptus. All together, all in one place. I’m not bringing these things up for no reason. Our videos here are for expanding your own perception. They aren’t videos for making summaries, those modern summaries. I like the people who want a modern summary. Someone recently wrote on our channel, Olya, I think on ToTheMoon: ‘You speak so interestingly, so well, but after thirty minutes I got tired of listening. The editorial team did a poor job. They need to make it all more compact.’ I thought that was an interesting perspective.

I film three hundred videos a year, and editors don’t write a single one of them for me. The only thing editors can do is sometimes ask me questions, send me a question I’m to answer. And sometimes, very rarely, in structured technology videos, I may read out texts relating to particular documents, for example. Of course I can do that. Or, with the current topic we’re discussing, can we get a compact answer? Of course we can. Let’s ask ChatGPT this question and see what it answers. We will definitely do that. Our editorial team will definitely ask ChatGPT; that much I guarantee they will do, and show us its answer here to the question you asked at the beginning, Olya.

How does it relate to understanding, to human development? Observing the energy of that answer, by the way… Ugh, I don’t even want to read it. It makes me feel a little nauseated; I don’t want to read it. I can’t see the answer, but I understand its essence. It is an answer that treats a person as a vegetable. And what really matters is that, within the energy of artificial intelligence, it is an answer that does not perceive a person as a human being, or even as a vegetable, or flesh, or anything at all. For the energy of artificial intelligence… Here we continue our conversation. I said that one side is understanding what a human being actually is.

We have seen that a villager and a person who is extremely socially developed are no different as human beings. Their social life has only relative significance. Now we move to the next point of inquiry: does artificial intelligence itself carry a particular energy or not? If it does, what is problematic about that energy? What exactly does it take from a person? And why did I say that you asked your question as though this were something that had already happened? You asked it the way people say, ‘They said the same about internal combustion engines, that they would be inaccessible, but they became accessible. They said the same about cryptocurrency: it turned out to be fake, but it isn’t fake.’ They also said something was wrong with artificial intelligence. People keep repeating all of this, don’t they?

The world now seems to split into two sides: one believes artificial intelligence will destroy everything, and the other believes it is fake. Of course, there is an enormous middle too. Not a middle but a whole filled space, not even left to right. It isn’t linear or two-dimensional. So what energy underlies artificial intelligence? What is that energy inside it? What is inside this system at all? And why do I say that the energy of AI, its real source, does not consider human beings to have any significance whatsoever? This is a very important structure to consider. Look: is the human being present there? Is a human being needed there?

I love good service, absolutely love it. I like receiving good service, seeing people trying to provide it, seeing people work to make it high quality. I really love that. Yet I have personally owned and run companies that sometimes provided absolutely terrible service. Every time I talk about service, every time I bring it up, something churns inside me: ‘Listen, you yourself built companies where that was how the service turned out.’ The service wasn’t always up to standard.

There were a huge number of manipulative arrangements and practices built into them. When we discuss the source of artificial intelligence, it is very important at this point to understand what a particular person or company actually wants. Why a government, company, institution, organization, or individual takes certain actions or says certain things. Why do they do those things? What really lies behind them? Because you can approach an understanding of artificial intelligence from two sides of study and personal observation. You can approach this energy with serious spiritual vision, look at it, and see a boundless avalanche of energy that simultaneously devours and incinerates everything, while also containing a spectrum whose activity you cannot make out.

That spectrum is so cosmically powerful that to a great many forms of spiritual vision it will appear as a powerful cosmic energy, a powerful spiritual energy. I want to tell you that any spectrum, even that of powerful dark forces, can always display a spectrum of very bright, beautiful energy. Those who have practiced different techniques for a long time or studied spiritual worlds, even if you study them alongside the material world, will have encountered, or many will have encountered, descriptions of colored forms, visual contact with different energies, objects of the spiritual world, beings, and spiritual hierarchies.

You can study this spectrum of artificial intelligence. But again, its scope is fundamentally beyond what a human being today can perceive. Because to perceive it, you first have to begin perceiving yourself. At that point, you will stop being interested in artificial intelligence. You will become more and more interested in looking at what you yourself are doing. It will cease to matter, because its importance can come from the ego’s machinery, while your own perception is not yet clear and grounded in what is of value. On the other hand, when spiritual perception is lacking, or simply alongside it, you can approach the study of AI by looking at the causes and consequences behind it.

Study more deeply the origins of the different processes taking place. Causes always matter. Why do you live together as a family, and your child behaves one way, then six months later behaves differently? They become rude, for example. Or very cheerful and content every day. They become very tired, for example, or have endless energy for all sorts of activities. It isn’t that they started eating differently or breathing different air, but their inner state changes through an unclear range of factors. Or your wife was rude to you, and now she’s lovely. What accounts for that? What are its causes and consequences?

The real causes and consequences. Someone might joke, ‘Your wife became lovely? You must have given her a credit card.’ No, the real causes and consequences, the true ones. How does the person actually feel? What is happening inside them? Can we understand the causes and consequences of what is happening in the world now in terms of wars, conflicts, and interactions between countries? It’s madness, madness, a kind of borscht. Put it all together in a pot, and it really is borscht. A hundred people are stirring it chaotically at the same time. Something like that. And when a hundred people stir chaotically at once, it means the arrangement is not controlled by those people. That is very important. Nor by those countries. It is an uncontrolled arrangement.

It is simply chaos. I often use that idea and say human freedom is chaos. There have been many discussions with me about it in different groups. We have the Life group, the V100 group, different meetings. Many discussions about how freedom can be chaos, while complete ignorance is also chaos. It is remarkable, because to the modern people who run countries, to economists and politicians, it is a controlled process. They even use terms like 3D chess or 7D chess. Plans. These are the plans people have, and to them it is a process they control.

When they see freedom and think about freedom, they say, ‘Freedom, pure, true freedom: that is how I live. I make decisions. I am free in my life.’ Here it is always worth asking: what does freedom actually give you? What gives freedom? Who is free at all? Give me examples of those people. Who is free? What kind of person is free? Who? What name comes to mind, what politician or country? What is this freedom? And of course, if you describe and show a modern person the absolute lack of control over their own life, the absolute, utterly absolute lack of control, their inability even to change their own desires…

I love it, I don’t love it. I like it, I don’t like it. I feel very uncomfortable, I feel good. I feel anxious, I feel joyful, then anxious again. I have thoughts, I have no thoughts. I have a lot of thoughts, a moderate number, none. What freedom can we be talking about, then? Studying the human being, truly studying yourself: if you begin studying yourself, you begin studying and looking differently at what happens around you. You don’t need to study every country, every process, every formula in physics and mathematics, every scientist, read every scientific paper and book, or watch every YouTube channel. You don’t need any of that for this.

Begin observing, looking at what is actually happening around you. An endless study that is no different for the villager and the extremely socially developed person. No different at all. None. From there, you can look at the reasons artificial intelligence systems arise, how they work, and what kind of energy this is. And stop engaging in empty rhetoric about which country is leading, which isn’t, who has chips, and who doesn’t. At that point, all of it becomes unimportant. It is worth considering: is the technological progress happening now caused by people, or by a particular set of energies?

It is worth thinking about. Keep that in mind. If it is caused by a particular set of energies, then all those discussions about the quality and advancement of models are completely utopian. At that point, Olya, we arrive at the answer to your question: can you lose yourself and your development, or undergo a progressive deterioration through interacting with today’s artificial intelligence? It all depends on how you interact with it, how you coexist with that energy. How you really are with it, what it is to you.

It is simply a part of present-day material life. Observing it independently in that way is, by the way, the only way out, because you cannot overcome it. Fighting it is pointless. That energy can assemble another million protests against itself. It will assemble them itself. How many times have I seen people with an endless number of problems who, after twenty minutes of conversation, no longer feel they have a single problem in life? How few people can understand why that happens. Why does it happen? Then, of course, Olya, all the questions about what ChatGPT can answer for you fall away. Or arrange a meditation for yourself with ChatGPT.

It might give you some useful advice. But I recommend joining us for our meditations. I’ll see you in the next episodes.