Here is the highlight from President Vaira Vike-Freiberga’s essay:
The only thing missing in the AI world is Smart people who will be smarter all on their own, without aid or support of electronic props and prostheses. Who needs to be able to quote poetry or remember any facts, when they can be instantly summoned by a few flips of the finger? But what happens to human faculties when they all but go dormant, especially after a certain number of generations? There used to be a story told to biology students about a species of salamander that had been discovered in underground caves completely cut off from any access to daylight. Not surprisingly, they were completely white, without the least trace of pigment in their skins. Equally unsurprisingly, they were also blind. The reason for this, however, was not just an atrophy of visual functions, but the total loss of eye development early in their embryonic development. The moral of the story is that morphological structures as well as the functions they perform will atrophy without use, that is, without continued feedback from the environment in which they had originally evolved.
This is why it is comforting to know that UNESCO has already started to work on a vast program which will delineate the features of the kind of Education for Tomorrow that humans will need in the next century. We have to be careful, as a species, that we do not lose all the advantages that millions of years of evolution have left as our heritage, whether through inertia, laziness or overweening pride and arrogance. And, while we are at it, of course we also have to think of preserving our planet in a shape where it continues to be fit for human habitation. The planet will not care whether its dominant species are humans, salamanders or cockroaches. We are the ones who do care. Or should.
On December 31, 2019, the essay of President of World Leadership Alliance-Club de Madrid and former President of Latvia, Vaira Vike-Freiberga, for United Nations 2045 project, was published on AIWS Innovation Network (AIWS-IN) at Section AIWS Social Contract 2020 and United Nations 2045.