The Paradox Of AI: Enhancing, Not Replacing, Natural Intelligence March 23, 2026

T K Arun

AI will enable new human activity not imagined hitherto, to realise that potential, education must train young minds to develop critical thinking and imagination

Israel has bombed the 365 sq km of Gaza into death, devastation and rubble. It is reasonable to think, on seeing such destruction, of “(a) heap of broken images, where the sun beats, / And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, / And the dry stone no sound of water.” Donald Trump, however, saw the possibility of building a Riviera of the Middle East.

It was characteristic that he saw real estate possibilities, rather than reconstruction of Gazan life to the extent possible. However, even Trump is superior to those who see only destruction and terrifying loss, as a result of the rise of Artificial Intelligence. AI will probably not just enhance the productivity of existing jobs, but also make several jobs redundant, such as simple coding, spotting and fixing bugs in legacy software, and creating summaries of legal contracts.

When AI gets a physical body to inhabit, that is, when robots turn intelligent, many manual jobs could also disappear. Polishing diamonds, cutting fabric, stitching garments, and shelling cashew nuts could all get automated.

Of course, this would be disruption on a massive scale. How would we be able to survive, find jobs for those displaced from their traditional occupations? Should we tax the companies that deploy AI/robots at additional rates to compensate for the loss of personal income tax from employees who have been displaced, and distribute the proceeds to the displaced? Or should we prepare for Gen Z uprisings every now and then as loss of jobs and incomes spread discontent, besides a rise in homelessness and petty crime?

We do have one shield against such a fallout from the rise of AI: NI or Natural Intelligence (the term organic intelligence is often conflated with organoid intelligence, which derives from computing done by brain cells developed in a petri dish).

It is NI that came to humanity’s rescue when previous waves of paradigm-shifting technology swept across human life: when the steam engine displaced animal power, when electricity replaced steam power, when the internal combustion engine drove horses and carriages out of public life, when the printing press and the typewriter made scribes redundant, when computer-driven word processors stripped stenographers of function, save denoting the rank of their boss.

The human brain and its capacity for creativity, innovation and imagination will come up with new things to do with AI, new ways to spend the time freed up by AI agents.

AI has created AlphaFold, the family of programs, currently in its third iteration, which can predict the shapes of proteins, including, with AlphaFold 3, how proteins interact with DNA and RNA, making drug discovery easier. Discovering new drugs would be a new line of activity opened up by AI.

Coffee connoisseurs (and would-be connoisseurs) pay fancy prices for coffee beans that have been eaten, digested and excreted by different creatures, the palm civet in Indonesia, the elephant, in Thailand and the Jacu bird in Brazil (up to $2,000 per kg). What if AI could innovate chemistry that performs in the factory the function these diverse digestive juices perform on the coffee bean inside the intestine? Coffee earnings would go up.

Wines could age 20 years in 20 days, new flavours created and savoured, food built molecule by molecule in entirely new ways. A new-fangled 3D printer could replace the oven. Heroin and Cocaine might be stripped of addictive properties, an LSD high rendered no more harmful than the suspension of disbelief entailed in watching a superhero movie.

AI might enable the infinitesimal recalibrations of the magnetic field required to contain the raging plasma in which hydrogen atoms fuse to produce helium and massive energy. Limitless cheap energy might enable re-greening the Thar desert, and growing saffron on tailormade soil at tailormade temperatures in tailormade weather. Climate change might be reversed by removing carbon dioxide from the air, and converting captured CO2 into gritty particles of carbon that would put an end to sand mining from riverbeds, apart from into that allotrope of Carbon that, when synthesized on a large enough scale, would put De Beers out of business.

AI could open up entirely new avenues in entertainment, allowing audiences to become active participants in what they see.

All this, of course, is conjecture, at least for now. The point is that many things the White Queen believed before breakfast could turn into practical options by the advance of technology with the help of AI deployed in different streams of knowledge.

The AI has to be deployed, it will not deploy itself — not unless the dystopia of artificial super intelligence materializes. NI is the agent that will deploy AI in this area or the other, to this task or the other.

The biggest challenge of AI is the cultivation of NI. Schooling, as practised in India, smothers NI. A culture that holds all knowledge to be finite and pre-existing, as contained in the Vedas, kills critical thinking. Changing that culture without uprooting the civilizational ethos that defines the subcontinent beyond geography, that is, rejecting what is toxic in the tradition and embracing what is wholesome, is itself a major challenge — of democracy, and not just of freeing and nourishing NI.

Teaching the mind to be free, and roam outside narrow domestic walls, without getting bogged down in the dreary desert sand of dead habit, on a population-wide scale, so that every man, woman and child can be a master of AI, rather than its victim — that is the challenge presented by AI.

T.K. Arun, ex-Economic Times editor, is a columnist known for incisive analysis of economic and policy matters.

The article was first published in The Sanjaya Report as The biggest challenge of AI is freeing and nourishing natural intelligence on Feb 20, 2026.

Disclaimer: All views expressed in the article belong solely to the author and not necessarily to the Organisation.