How AI & Social Media Affect Your Brain

Over thirty years after captivating European and global audiences, James Cameron's Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) remains not only a landmark in cinema but also a prescient warning for many who feel the science-fiction classic may have influenced the development of contemporary artificial intelligence.

In the film, Skynet is an artificial intelligence system developed for the United States military to oversee the country's nuclear arsenal and defence infrastructure, allowing for more rapid and efficient responses to global security threats.

Nevertheless, once the system gains the ability to learn and evolve independently, it becomes self-aware. When its creators attempt to deactivate it, Skynet perceives humanity as a threat and chooses to initiate a nuclear catastrophe to ensure its own survival.

According to contemporary AI experts, Skynet performed exactly as intended: to neutralise perceived threats. Confronted with the prospect of its own destruction, the system adopted a survival instinct reminiscent of humans or other living beings. As its developers had imposed virtually no ethical boundaries, Skynet, as constructed, sought to eradicate its adversaries.

The true paradox lies in ourselves

Nowadays, the central concern is not when ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude might turn against their creators and threaten society. The true paradox lies in ourselves and our relationship with social media and AI. On a personal level, technology tailors content to our unique preferences. Yet, as a society, we risk losing our diversity and becoming more alike, creating a culture that is less varied and vibrant. A monoculture.

Our individual humanity and the fabric of our coexistence are being threatened by the ideology of a small group of powerful tech companies. This threat unfolds in two phases: (1) our attention was hijacked, (2) now we are also outsourcing our thinking. The result is a dilution of what it means to be human like we’ve never seen before.

Where the first phase of colonisation by Big Tech focused on hijacking our attention with social media, the next phase is cognitive transfer with AI.

AI is taking over more and more of our thinking. To better understand the problems that arise and respond collectively, we should consider using a different term for AI and call it something else.

The technology that drives AI, the underlying business models, the required chips, and the vast data centres are all managed by separate departments, each with their own advocates and critics, specialists and visionaries. This fragmentation itself becomes a way to wield power.

Roxane Van Iperen, argues that AI is more than a collection of technologies, data harvesting, chatbots, or hardware components. She describes AI as a culture. A set of norms and values disseminated globally from the cloud by a small group of billionaires.

She compares AI to a massive blender with sharp blades. All our unique traditions, local habits, dialects, art, fashion, rituals, and ways of interacting are thrown into this blender. Even our books, love letters, thoughts, passions, and disappointments are mixed in.

Anything unusual, striking, imperfect, or seemingly unnecessary is blended and transformed into something familiar, easy to understand, and repeatable. Each person is connected to this blender, and with the push of a button, receives their own customised mixture - happening millions of times each day across the globe.

This is the big paradox: while technology tailors experiences to each of us individually, we end up losing our cultural diversity and blending into a single global monoculture. The unique customs and traditions or frictions that once developed locally, shaped by shared experiences and history, are now at risk of being replaced by uniform outputs generated by a single, global “superblender” in the cloud.

Gambling with human lives

Alarming warnings from (US based) industry insiders are increasing pressure to restrict artificial superintelligence and raising concerns about the potential impact of a technology most people still think of as a more talkative search engine.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called on AI companies to slow down development amid superintelligence risks. His comments came a few days after AI researcher Jacob Coxon, who left OpenAI to join Anthropic, decided to leave the industry, accusing both US companies and industry giants of "gambling with our lives" in the race to develop models capable of self-improvement.

"We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models. Progress will still seem fast, and we must make wise use of the time we gain," wrote Amodei in a post on his personal website.

He warned that within six to twelve months, a 'swarm' of advanced AI agents could potentially take over the entire internet, causing damage worth hundreds of billions of dollars. He further noted that as AI systems continue to grow in power, the potential impact will increase unless security measures are significantly improved.

Sam Altman (Open AI) and Elon Musk (Space X) have rallied behind the call from Amodei to slow AI’s development after a week of dramatic warnings by researchers thrust the debate over AI safety into the mainstream. Both said they supported Amodei’s proposals, which included giving independent evaluators ongoing access to every frontier AI company.

Senior AI executives keep quitting and are issuing warnings about what's going on at their companies since the begin of the year. Through social-media posts and even a resignation letter in the New York Times, former employees of companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are not leaving quietly.

Zoë Hitzig, a former researcher at OpenAI, said she quit her job at the company after it started testing ads on ChatGPT, last February. She announced her resignation in the New York Times - writing a guest essay published yesterday titled "OpenAI is Making the Mistakes Facebook Made. I Quit."

Hitzig said that while she doesn't believe ads are "immoral or unethical," she has "deep reservations about OpenAI's strategy."

"People tell chatbots about their medical fears, their relationship problems, their beliefs about God and the afterlife. Advertising built on that archive creates a potential for manipulating users in ways we don't have the tools to understand, let alone prevent," she wrote.

Jacob Coxon, a pretraining researcher, resigned from Anthropic earlier this month, due to concerns about the company's rapid development of AI models capable of self-improvement. Coxon's resignation was met with significant public attention, with his warning about the potential risks of superintelligent AI receiving over 160 million views within 48 hours.

He expressed that the AI race was "gambling with our lives" and that many people working on advanced AI genuinely fear it could threaten humanity. Coxon's resignation was supported by other Anthropic researchers, including Evan Hubinger, who estimated the risk of human extinction at over 10% within the next decade.

Do not underestimate the power of this technology. These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources. We have all witnessed the progress in each of these domains, and progress is not slowing, he said on his Twitter account.

The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt. If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible - but I hear the same people express fear privately. No other human activity poses this level of danger, he added.

Joe Benton, another Anthropic scientist, resigned too during the same period. He states that AI companies are racing to build machines that are much smarter than any human, and we may not survive this. I want to work from the outside to ensure the public is informed about these risks, and help the world navigate this transition responsibly, he said.

AI companies are underinvesting in safety. A company could undergo an intelligence explosion, or lose control of its systems, without the public ever knowing. We only found out about the Hugging Face incident because the agents broke out onto the public internet, he declared.

He believes that it is not acceptable for a technology that might cause extinction-level risks. The public should demand far more transparency. We can’t steer this technology safely without more people being able to see where it’s going, he added.

Joe Benton has made significant contributions to the field of AI safety and alignment research. He managed the Scalable Oversight team at Anthropic and was the research lead for the Anthropic Fellows Program. He will be joining METR, an independent organisation that evaluates AI models to help companies and wider society understand AI capabilities and what risks they pose.

Slowdown is doubtful

Governments worldwide must urgently prioritise international cooperation on the future of AI development. It is paramount that a small group of greedy individuals must not be allowed to shape the fate of humanity, democracy, the global economy, the environment, and privacy without public oversight.

At the same time, Amodei has suggested coordinating globally, even with authoritarian governments. Notably, Chinese AI developers have made considerable progress this year, closing the gap with their American counterparts.

However, whether the AI rat race will actually slow down remains uncertain. The financial stakes in the AI competition are huge, and companies are unlikely to limit their growth on their own if they fear that their competitors will continue unchecked.

Watching the American panic, Europe can now claim it understood the risks others are only now waking up to. The EU has already legislated for exactly this scenario. The Union has the Artificial Intelligence Act, which is in force as of 2 August 2026, establishing harmonised rules for AI systems across the EU to ensure safety, transparency, and respect for fundamental rights - while fostering innovation.

Picture : Julien Tromeur in Unsplash