In Artificial Intelligence, mankind may be fast surrendering its native intelligence, and perhaps much more, including its willpower and, ultimately, its moral agency, to machines. The question then is this: has humanity begun accelerating the process of ultimately surrendering its very soul to soulless creations of its own making, or are we standing at the threshold of a magnificent new horizon of limitless possibility?

It is almost as though an increasingly godless species has created for itself a machine god, an oracle that we endlessly consult for answers, guidance and even judgement. And this new god fattens itself on the accumulated intelligence of humanity: our books, discoveries, art, scholarship, conversations, experiences and ideas. We feed it with the products of human intelligence and then marvel at the intelligence it reflects back at us.

Yet it offers extraordinary rewards in return. AI promises astonishing advances in science and medicine, democratises access to knowledge and expertise, breaks down language barriers, eliminates drudgery and places capabilities once reserved for the few into the hands of millions. The bait of progress is not an illusion; it is real, powerful and increasingly irresistible.

But therein lies the paradox.

Human beings have always created tools that externalise some part of ourselves. Writing externalised memory. The calculator externalised arithmetic. Maps and GPS externalised navigation. But AI reaches deeper. Increasingly, we are externalising reasoning, expression, interpretation and creativity. And as we begin to ask machines not merely what we can do, but what we should do, we risk externalising something more fundamental still: judgement, choice, responsibility and morality. Therein lies the weaponization long before the first shots of the artificial bullets begin to preselect their targets- the collective human species.

The danger, therefore, may not be simply that machines are becoming more intelligent. It may be that humans, seduced by their convenience and apparent authority, gradually become less inclined to exercise their own intelligence, their own will and their own moral judgement. At that stage, we become the machines and the machines become us.

There is an enormous difference between using AI to amplify human intelligence and allowing it to substitute for it. In the first, the machine challenges us, extends our reach and enables us to think and create beyond our previous limitations. In the second, we progressively surrender the very faculties that made its creation possible.

Perhaps the deepest irony is that mankind has fashioned an increasingly intelligent machine largely from fragments of itself. Narcissus has built a mirror that talks back, and, captivated by the brilliance of his reflection, risks forgetting that the original intelligence stands before the mirror.

So, with Artificial Intelligence, are humans rising to the skies, or are we sinking into the abyss?

Perhaps we are doing both at once: ascending technologically while risking descent intellectually, morally and spiritually.

The ultimate question may therefore not be how intelligent our machines will become, but what becomes of us in their presence. Will human beings continue to cultivate the curiosity, imagination, independent will, moral judgement and wisdom that made these machines possible in the first place? Or, having created machines to serve us, will we gradually surrender to them the very qualities that make us human? Is it the tail wagging the dog, or the dog losing its tail and all the features that makes it a dog? Is that a good or bad thing? Should we wait to see what the mirror fully reflects or start worrying about the reflection that is rising out of the mirror?