What's the most important question right now?

How can we make sure that people don’t stop thinking? Using AI is, of course, not the problem. But it can become a problem when using AI means that we think less for ourselves. Cognitive offloading is real, and over time, our skills can decline. People may even lose abilities they acquired and practised at the beginning of their careers.

Everyone who rides a bike should wear a helmet. If you don’t wear one and you fall, you can suffer a serious head injury or even permanent brain damage. A helmet cannot prevent the accident, but it can reduce the consequences.

The same principle should apply to AI, which leads me to my second question: What is the bike helmet for AI?

The AI helmet consists of three things. First, AI literacy: people need to understand what AI can and cannot do, including its limitations and risks. Second, clear rules: organisations need to define when and how AI should be used, where the limits are, and communicate those rules internally. And third: human thinking first. Always.

For myself, I’m thinking about introducing an AI-free day: one day a week when I deliberately don’t use AI and rely on my own brain instead. Mindday instead of Monday.

Where are we taking AI too seriously, and where not seriously enough?

We are not taking copyright seriously enough. In two ways: Most LLMs have been trained on huge amounts of copyrighted material. There should be many, many more lawsuits against AI companies. Second, there is our own use of AI. Just because an AI can generate an image, a text or a piece of music doesn’t automatically mean that we should do it. There are illustrators, musicians, photographers and writers out there who make a living from their creative work.

And we’re taking AI too seriously when we treat its answers as if they came from a human expert and were objective and truthful. But as we all know, they are not. So we shouldn’t treat them that way or take them too seriously.

What future are you looking forward to?

I have two 10-year-old boys. I’m thinking a lot about their future and how AI will affect it. How will they learn? What jobs will they have? Most probably, they will learn in ways we can’t even imagine today and they will have jobs that don’t exist yet.

I’m not scared, not of AI, and not of their future or ours. Honestly, I don’t know what this future will look like. But that’s totally fine. Of course, I tell them a bit about AI and how these tools work. But what I really try to teach them is self-confidence and curiosity. And that the possibilities they have are almost endless.

And I think that doesn’t just apply to kids. It applies to all of us. We don’t need to be afraid of AI or the future. But we need to understand how technology works, and we need the confidence and curiosity to deal with whatever comes next.