My Fear of Artificial Intelligence

Al-Rafi’ Bashir Al-Shafi’

[1] I was truly astonished by the level that artificial intelligence has reached when I needed to create presentations about gemology two weeks ago. I’m the prodigal son who abandoned his involvement in the field of web development decades ago, having started in 1997.
What amazed me was how AI now facilitates the creation of PowerPoint presentations in an impressive, swift, and highly accurate manner — from generating slides to structuring the topics of gemology and other sciences.

There’s no doubt that artificial intelligence will transform our reality into a second version of life itself. It will reshape the natural lens of human perception, shifting it from truth to illusion. It will “derail” the human view of reality and alter the credibility of things through simulation and deception. It will also transform humanity’s auditory and visual tastes, potentially gaining control over the pathways of falsification that guide human thought, understanding of life, and perhaps even our perceptions of the afterlife and religious beliefs.

[3] On another front, social intelligence will affect traditional human communication and change how people interact with and engage in different fields of knowledge. It will reshape how sciences are taught and received, impacting privacy, specialization, and the effectiveness of how professions and industries are presented. This will all be powered by machine learning, algorithms, and a remarkably simple interface despite the deeply complex and interconnected technical infrastructure of networks and digital channels.

Of course, humans have benefited from algorithms, machine learning languages, and eventually from the internet — with its speed, accuracy, data preservation mechanisms, search engines, and the ability to retrieve and connect information quickly.

Back when we studied web development in 1997, we learned how to search for information on the internet using a small set of code called “meta” tags placed at the beginning of website pages. The meta tag utilized probabilistic science in search functions, enabling web developers to input a word or phrase along with its synonyms and related keywords. For example, for the word “Sudan,” you’d enter: (Sudan, Khartoum, White Nile, Blue Nile, Sudanese companies, etc.). So when someone searches for “Sudan,” the meta tag would surface everything related to it from the web’s archive.

This search layer is what evolved into what we now call Artificial Intelligence (AI).
It has since expanded to encompass design, audio-visual integration, text analysis, language translation, data aggregation across industries and sciences, art, painting, surgery, medical sciences, astronomy, and more.

It now powers the creation of robots, simulates living beings, advances agriculture through genetic modification, assists in surgeries, and replaces humans in industries, crafts, arts, translation, warfare, space communication, and even deception.

What we fear most is the complete distortion of human nature, purpose, and credibility — the destruction of morals, values, and faith — the fragmentation of families, and the creation of artificial alternatives for everything.

The truly unfortunate part is that in the Islamic, Arab, and African worlds, we have chosen the role of blind recipients and passive followers. As the saying goes, “Even if they enter a lizard’s hole, we will follow them in.” What’s worse is that we aren’t even good at following or utilizing such technologies. We use them as dazzled, ignorant spectators — blindly trusting in the knowledge of others — and so we become marginalized in life, even though we were the ones who originally invented the very “algorithms of zero and one” on which all computer sciences are now based. And yet, we abandoned our own contributions.

God is in control of His affairs.