Jason Snyder, Forbes; The Mirror Trap: AI Ethics And The Collapse Of Human Imagination
"The Crisis - Imagination and AI Ethics
We are not racing toward a future of artificial intelligence—we are disappearing into a hall of mirrors. The machines that many of us believed would expand reality are erasing it. What we call progress is merely a smoother reflection of ourselves, stripped of our rough edges, originality, and imagination, raising urgent questions for the future of AI ethics.
AI doesn’t innovate; it imitates. It doesn’t create; it converges.
Today, we don’t have artificial intelligence; we have artificial inference, where machines remix data, and humans provide the intelligence. And as we keep polishing the mirrors, we aren’t just losing originality—we are losing ownership of who we are.
The machines won’t need to replace us. We will surrender to their reflection, mistaking its perfection for our purpose. We’re not designing intelligence—we’re designing reflections. And in those reflections, we’re losing ourselves. We think we’re building machines to extend us. But more often, we’re building machines that imitate us—smoother, safer, simpler versions of ourselves."
