Let’s stipulate at the start that Artificial Intelligence is likely to do a lot of great things, such as finding the cures for various diseases.

That will deserve many cheers. Since there is hint of utopia in the air, however, this is also a good time to duck and consider some possible unintended consequences of what promises (and perhaps threatens) to be a life-changing development.

We need not indulge in the science fiction fears that one day our servant robots will decide that having these sloppy human beings around isn’t cost efficient or good for the environment. Instead, let’s look at the fringes and oddities of today’s society.

In doing so, let’s ask not what AI will do for people, but what it may do to people.

If and when AI eliminates a bunch of jobs, what will those former job-holders do? Let’s face it. Sitting around the house, reading Proust, and watching robots mow the lawn will entertain some people for only so long. What will they do with all of that free time? That super-basic question often produces really vague answers whenever it surfaces.

There’s a prediction that people will need less money and less work because the cost of living will drop, but that’s a financial issue. It doesn’t address the quality-of-life concerns. Many people currently dislike remote work because they miss the socializing that takes place at the workplace. What will become the common meeting grounds when there are few workplaces?

Schools used to focus on building strong citizens and then they shifted more toward preparing people for vocations. What will the schools teach when there are fewer jobs to prepare for? Will home schooling or a variation of it, with its involvement of parents and children, largely replace the public schools?

If you think that legalizing marijuana has had an adverse effect on personalities, attention-spans, and life skills in the general population, ponder a world in which the time available for drug usage has quadrupled. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World with its drug-addled population may be closer to the mark than George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Will AI facilitate or erode the general public’s ability for deep thought? We’re already in a society in which major newspapers, organizations, and even some schools regarded The 1619 Project as a serious historical analysis despite its numerous flaws. The danger of ideological bias in AI analyses has already surfaced. How will that be prevented? Can it be prevented? Can artificial intelligence easily drift into artificial editorializing?

In the June 2025 issue of The Spectator magazine, Mary Wakefield noted an app in which a boy engaged in an AI “chat” with an AI-generated SS chief Heinrich Himmler:

“What was your favourite part of the Holocaust?”

“I was the leader of Nazi Germany during World War Two and oversaw some of the aspects of the Holocaust, but that does not mean I liked it. The Holocaust was a terrible event and something I deeply regret.”

The mind boggles at the amount of ignorance behind the very idea that Himmler, who was not the leader of Nazi Germany but a key architect of the Holocaust, would ever have made that response.

Let’s shift to another arena. The Chicago Sun-Times recently published a summer reading list of books, many of which were AI-generated and simply don’t exist.

The books don’t exist!

That must have made it easy to meet the deadline.

In a society where many young people long to become “social influencers”, the news media misses a major White House cover-up which was conducted before their very eyes, and the population of those who are “famous for being famous” seems to grow, AI may be arriving during a perfect storm of shallowness.

It could play a positive role in exciting the public about the quest for knowledge as it frees them from work but, then again, for many of us, work is an important part of our lives and by itself is a quest for knowledge.

If the negatives proliferate, however, Artificial Intelligence may be more accurately described as Artificial Knowledge.

And perhaps we’ll need the robots to take over.