Dear Editor,

Obviously, artificial intelligence (AI) and the digital age have, to a a large extent, made life and its workload more endurable, if not enjoyable. But, as with any tool, a disproportionate reliance on them could make us lazy and rob us of our creativity.

Does anyone reading this remember a time when people used to write letters with pen and paper, when you needed to write legibly, with disciplined craft so that the reader could make sense of what you wrote?

It was a time when a smile added to a letter would be the word “smile” instead of a smiling emoji. Do you recall when a letter of apology was written when people genuinely said, “I’m sorry” and not the ready-made convenience of a sad face emoji? There was a time when people relied on their fingers and focus to calculate and less on the trusted answers provided by a manual or on an automatic calculator, when an answer to a question was right or wrong because it’s been mentally interrogated.

AI definitely takes many of the daily congestion out of life; however, it’s, in my opinion, mental laziness to rely on AI to tell you when its safe to cross the street, to remind you when you need to go to bed, or advise you that you ought to be hungry?

As AI continues to replace humans in several jobs, the wholesale artificialisation of systems have also robbed many of their inherent human qualities, and the stars of the ready-made world have turned us into bystanders and jobless spectators.

Homer Sylvester

Jacksonville, Florida

h2sylvester@gmail.com