Copyright thenassauguardian
Dear Editor, Many Bahamians are embracing AI as if it were an easy path to brilliance. However, this mindset can be dangerous. If you rely solely on AI to seem intelligent, nothing truly changes. You might appear smart and sound insightful, but those ideas are not your own, they are simply AI reworking the thoughts of others. This is where the real threat lies. AI is not replacing human effort, it is competing with human creativity and imagination. Bahamians must not become passive consumers in this new era. We are already facing a cultural crisis, where too many people repeat, repost, recycle, and reshare content without truly creating anything new. The advent of AI has made this even easier – you can generate a speech, produce a proposal, write a letter, or draft a policy without engaging your mind. When a nation stops thinking, it stops innovating, and when it stops innovating, it risks becoming economically irrelevant. The Bahamas is perilously close to becoming a nation where ideas fail to evolve, only opinions do. For decades, dependency thinking has shaped our mindset. If we don’t cultivate discipline, AI could amplify this dependency. This technology has the potential to make us creators. Still, if we aren’t careful, it may instead magnify our intellectual laziness and turn us into permanent passengers in someone else’s future. AI reveals a harsh truth: many Bahamians have never been creatively or intellectually productive. Instead, they were merely remixing what culture provided. Artificial Intelligence is now exposing this emptiness on a larger scale. We should utilize AI to enhance original thinking, rather than circumventing it. AI should serve as a laboratory rather than a crutch. It should assist us in testing models, refining theories, developing business cases, creating prototypes, challenging assumptions, and accelerating discovery. Bahamians must leverage Artificial Intelligence to create new frameworks, solutions, approaches, and industries, rather than using it solely to generate social media content, arguments, or catchy quotes more quickly. Our national competitiveness relies on this crucial shift. If The Bahamas turns into a nation of AI parrots instead of AI architects, we would fall behind the rest of the world more quickly than during any previous global transformation. We must not allow AI to create a new form of dependency, whether political, welfare-related, or reliant on foreign direct investment, where we wait for others to do our thinking for us. Artificial Intelligence sets a higher standard, making it impossible for the lazy to pretend otherwise. The future belongs to those who leverage AI to enhance their minds, not replace them. We must promote this attitude in our schools, business culture, journalism, governance, and innovation economy. If Bahamians wish to stay relevant, competitive, and sovereign in this technological age, we must recommit to independent thought. Artificial Intelligence is not the threat, a generation that stops thinking is. — Noēsis, critical thinker
