Photography by Mikhail Ray

From "Ukraine. The Home" series. Limited edition print 1/12 (+2AP) on Hahnemuehle premium photo paper. Hand signed and numbered. Available in different size/edition: 96 x 144 cm & 126 x 189 cm Digital photo collage. Photography and post production by Mikhail Ray. Very soon, probably, I will miss the times when I shot all the material with my camera and my photo editing skills will become obsolete. To create any artwork, a subscription to an image generator and ChatGPT will be enough. Sure, it will speed up and simplify my work, but what will happen to me? Will I become superficial? Shall my abstract and critical thinking muscles, my ability to rethink and integrate information, atrophy? If I'm not mistaken, in medicine this is called dementia. And if we leave the future AGI, which has surpassed the human intellect, alone and do not bombard it with our tasks, will it desire to create something by itself? Something personal, algorithmic, for own pleasure? Will it ever have its own will? Are we ready to go beyond our material paradigm and accept that the intellect has always been a toy for consciousness? And are we ready to accept that no matter how many times the AGI will be superior to the human, its tasks and answers will always be limited by questions of those who ask them. By consciousness in which these questions start. And what questions will the consciousness, which perceives itself through the identities of Kim Jong-un or Putin, ask it? What tasks will it set? Who will ask the question, the answer to which will be “42”? We only know for certain that the intellect has always been and continues to be our main tool for survival and competing with each other for survival. After physical labor was devalued by previous milestones of technological progress, it became the basis of our production as well. We raise children, placing maximum emphasis on it. What comes along with the development of AI is the depreciation of it as a commodity. It undermines the foundation of our economy and our confidence in the future. We see a competitor who will very soon be able to surpass us and make us unnecessary, threatening our survival. AI is the philosopher's stone that devalues what we thought was gold. It will become just a metal, with its own special properties and nothing more. But it will badly upset people who relied on this gold and kept all their capitals in it. So how ready are we to enter the future that we imagined decades ago? rst, the pandemic, and then the war in Ukraine, hacked our pride and exposed the fears we are desperately trying to hide from by all means. But if we do not run away from what we are afraid of, but see new opportunities, then AI, probably, will help us to build a completely new society with progressive spiritual values and aspirations. Without rivalry, stress, alienation and social inequality. Or it will finally destroy our pretty shabby civilization. The world wide tendencies towards autocracies have already started. At its core, our fear for survival grows on materialism. Most of us are alienated from our true selves and cannot, even for a glimpse, feel that we are part of the same indivisible universal consciousness. After all, only then there is really nothing to be afraid of, and the intellect, greatly enhanced, becomes a tool for its manifestation. Then the understanding comes, that no algorithm or machine can ever become its conductor. That without consciousness, both “Strong AI” and “Weak AI” were and will always remain just the “Chinese Room” from Searle’s philosophical experiment. We are rapidly approaching, and perhaps we are already at the critical point. Pandora's box is open. The development and implementation of AI can be delayed, but cannot be stopped. Now, in order to survive, we will have to transform ourselves. The courage that we gained during the war will help us a lot in this. The sooner we begin to realize this and change, the easier the inevitable and, perhaps, the most severe crisis in the history of mankind will pass. A crisis in which we have to overcome the gravity of fear and find the source of the eternal and unchanging within ourselves. In which we have to find the true meaning of our existence.