Humanity’s future depends on our cooperating with, and understanding, other people. If we do both these things there are no limits to what we can become. If we don’t, we will kill each other in a competitive scramble of greed and envy. Understanding and cooperating are not very difficult but they do require us to think. If we treat AI as merely an answering machine we will think less and squabble more. If we treat AI as a challenge to us to think better than it can, it will stimulate us to the understanding we need. Then we will cooperate.
We are only just beginning to educate children to think. Our schools have assumed they already knew how. Few people do, even when they are grown up and educated – because they were never taught. The following is a very simple approach to fundamental thinking. Use it and you can expand it to think as deeply as Daniel Kahneman or as skillfully as Yuval Noah Harari. Apart from the material benefits you accrue by thinking, you open up a world of interest, a world in which you participate with joy and fun.
Thinking isn’t effort-free. Physical exercise requires physical effort. Mental exercise asks for mental effort. The rewards are tremendous. Your brain remains active throughout your life, your interest is excited by even the most mundane of events, your views become of value, not only to you but to others, too, and you can enjoy and earn for as long as you like.
You live a full life. Nobody can ask for more than that. Here’s how:
The basis of all thinking is the answer to six questions about life: What is happening? What is going to happen? Why will it happen? What happened? What is the consequence of what happened? What will happen next? Initially, when you are young, these questions will deal with the short term and the local. Later they will also apply to the long term and the world. Thinking is both anchored and destabilized by these questions – they provide structure but also remind us of the limits of knowledge. That is how thinking starts. Philosophers think long-term. Politicians used to think longer-term than they do now. So did most people.
Speeding up life shortened thinking time. We’ve learned to rush but not to wait.
Trying to organise useful thoughts about thinking while AI is developing is like making the case for a shovel when a new source of energy is discovered below ground. Vital as the instrument is seen to be, it looks like a rather old, well-established resource against billions of dollars invested in new energy production. Shouldn’t we have mighty laws and enforcement to tame the growing beast?
In truth, the mental shovel of thinking has been refined and often reduced by process for many years already. A revival of the fundamentals of human ingenuity is not a backward glance but a timely reminder that we are in charge. Without that as our objective we will lose control. We don’t know the consequences of that happening but the disappearance of choice is one.
Let us take the lead in relating our own thinking to the mechanistic but lightning-fast thinking of Augmented Intelligence. If you see doing so as a lost cause, you have already surrendered your own humanity.
If you see it as a chance to develop the wondrous creation we have been given, you are starting a unique journey,
One that you will always rejoice you took.
Good morning
John Bittleston
To learn who rules over you find out
who you are not allowed to criticise.
Voltaire (1694-1778)
We shall write more about AI and its human / mechanistic interface.
Please tell us if you’d like that – at [email protected].
21 January 2026
