- In Dune, Frank Herbert features an exchange in which individuals are tested for their humanity.
“Why do you test for humans?” he asked.
“To set you free.”
“Free?”
“Once, men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.” View Highlight 2025-09-17
Now, in the age of the internet—when the Library of Alexandria could fit on a medium-sized USB stick and the collected wisdom of humanity is available with a click—we’re engaged in a rather large, depressingly inept social experiment of downloading endless knowledge while offloading intelligence to machine
if we get dazzled by new-fangled tools to the extent that we fail to understand the importance of language and cognitive development, we risk destroying the essence of what makes us special. Without due care, our most beautiful aptitude could be stripped bare to a soulless output, unable to be fully appreciated by untrained minds.
