One of the greatest myths about education is the idea that our whole student career is about learning and retaining information.

The reality is that education at every level – whether we are at preschool or studying for a PhD – is about learning and gaining proficiency in educated method. Be that the ability to write with a pen, to do arithmetic or most importantly, how we engage in the process of learning through the research and discovery of information, and how we then process that information so that our understanding of any subject and our ability to apply that learning in a practical way has been formed.

By allowing AI into education or any life process where it is beneficial for us to learn and discern BEFORE we then understand it properly ourselves, we are effectively opening a trap door back to an unenlightened age where only those considered to be special in some way, will be automatically granted access to the magic formulas of learning that we woefully take for granted today.

The very instructions for civilised life are now in the process of being taken away by AI.

History is the greatest of tutors. It wasn’t that long ago that the only people who were educated and could read and write were the wealthy, those in the employ of the church and the landed gentry.

A return to the dark ages of ignorance is the direction that our unquestioning acceptance of AI and all related technologies will take us, without change.

Al works by analysing patterns of behaviour over and over again.

So, when AI reads you doing just a few a few of the things that it has read in the behaviour of others somewhere else – perhaps many times before, AI will conclude that you will be the same in your other behaviours to those that relate to whoever those compared examples have come from before.

On the majority of occasions AI will certainly appear to be right. But what AI is right about will be generalisations.

AI will not and cannot ever be 100% right about what makes anyone tick. Nor can AI be fully right about the real ingredients or idiosyncrasies of what really makes any of us who we really are.

Regrettably, what seems like the magic or trickery of being able to fit each and every one of us into a box or category based on little more than patterns, will be enough to convince those who intend to profit from AI, that artificial intelligence is the power that will make them the new gods.

They are a long way from being anywhere near correct.

The human condition is built upon a foundation of difference or separation at its most basic and intricate level.

To consider any number of people as if they can be understood and treated as if they are exactly the same is not only the behaviour of people who believe they are the equivalent of a god. The oppression and restriction that naturally follows is an act against humanity itself – whether or not the victims have any conscious understanding of what is happening or what is involved.

AI cannot fully understand you. But the people who pay for it believe that it can.

This belief is what makes them feel powerful. But it is a power built on oppression, not understanding, as all power should.

Deep down, everyone and especially the few who have everything know what the real value of a human and the human experience is.

However, the reality is that even as slaves, humans are not a thing that any other human can truly own. Whereas a machine that is perceived to have the same abilities as a human is something that they can own, and therefore cheaply control.

If you had read everything on the internet – and I mean quite literally everything, AND you were able to recall all of it, recognise similarities between different sources and pieces of information, make conclusions and then present whatever you have come up with as a finished piece of work – and do all of this in no more than a couple of seconds, it would be reasonable to expect that whoever asked you to do this would automatically assume that you were very special indeed.

It wouldn’t matter whether you were right or wrong. Just like one of the very best magicians performing their art to an audience on stage, it wouldn’t be the outcome of the act that would leave you speechless. It would be the unasked question of how that outcome was achieved.

With all of the information that AI has access to, that it will inevitably always be updating, many of us will automatically assume, and therefore believe, that with the speed and apparent resourcefulness that AI can demonstrate, that AI must be able to ‘think’.

The mystery of a process that achieves an outcome using methods that we do not or cannot understand is very compelling and very influential upon us.

But much like a Ponzi scheme or any other form of con that sounds too good to be true, it doesn’t necessarily follow that it’s good or that it’s right.

For as long as we believe in the mystery, it is the mystery that will hold all power over us.

Even if AI reaches the stage where it appears to be fully sentient and able to think fully for itself, the truth that everyone will sooner or later have to accept is that AI is only a programme or software code. AI will only function within the parameters that it was originally set – whether they are right, wrong or their function rests upon the question of whether they are genuinely complete.

For a machine or AI programme to fully understand the human condition, it would either have to be living the complete human experience itself, with the abilities and understanding that we all have, or would to have been comprehensively and exhaustively programmed by a programmer or programmers together, who possess this inexhaustible knowledge themselves.

AI will not become sentient in the way that humans and other ‘living’ creatures can be.

Even the ultimate act of self-preservation suggested as possible by the AI movie legend that is Skynet from the Terminator films, was functioning based upon the limitations of its programming when it launched an all-out nuclear attack upon the world.

The real problem that we face with any and all forms of AI and Artificial Intelligence for the future, is the governance and the ethical boundaries or restrictions that any of its forms is able to operate under – even if that operation is itself carried out under the misused term ‘self-learning’.

No AI programmer or group of AI programmers have anywhere near the universal understanding of the human experience that would enable them to create a program that alludes to it, let alone covers the universality in difference of the way that humans actually think.

The reason for this is that no human exists on this planet today, who has the understanding or even the ability to understand everyone else’s experiences and the processes which make them think or have made them think, throughout the history of time.

As such, the inherent problem with any AI programming is that if the programmer, programmers or anyone who makes a decision upon what that AI can or cannot do, then do so in a subjective, biased or prejudicial way at any level at all – which will include their own lack of knowledge and understanding of what each and every other human being on the planet or that has lived and will live, faced with the same situation would do – they will not have provided the AI with every possible parameter that it could have.

AI is only as good as the information that is available to it. But that regrettably doesn’t mean that it wouldn’t or couldn’t kill a human being as a consequence of working with or within the limitations of what it could ‘learn’ or know.

AI accurately mirrors the limitations of the thinking of its creators. To be all knowing, it would not only have had to have been created by God, It would also have to be God for it to be so.

You can rest assured that if any human being alive possessed this ‘all knowing’, universal and arguably complete level of knowledge and understanding today, the last thing they would be planning to unleash upon the world would be any form of unethical AI.

It is regrettable that the world functions as it does today, with a system that values the financial value of everything or against everything – including the value of human beings, rather than what the value of being human equips us with or what the experience of being a human will allow any of us to understand.

Arguments will be made that sensors and cameras that detect heat, light, moisture, facial expressions and just about every physical change or activity that is exhibited in any particular situation, will equip AI with an understanding of what being human is.

However, consciousness, emotion, empathy and the ability to reflect and to relate to other human beings is not a skill that can simply be programmed into software form – especially when the programmers have not experienced each and every human experience themselves and don’t have the ability to translate that information into programable form(s).

Regrettably, it will not take the experience of just a few of the things that AI will be able to do, to convince anyone who doesn’t think critically about what they are seeing or experiencing to believe that this is not the case.

A reality we face is that because the world is being run by people who don’t relate or even attempt to relate fully to what life is really like for every other human being, beyond the bubble of people who are sharing very similar life experiences to them, we already have massively disproportionate levels of inequality and a world system that is teetering on the edge.

Those responsible for all that is wrong in the world are the very same people whose ethics and ideas are fueling and driving the takeover of AI. The machines that they are responsible for are and will simply continue to be a mirror of the behaviour of their true masters.