In 1510, Copernicus theorized that the sun was the center of our solar system. This theory, coupled with the images from Galileo's telescope, revealed something completely improbable yet true: our earth was just another planet circling the Sun and not the true center.

This thought shook the society that dared to think it, resulting in public and private departures from Catholic dogma and house arrest for that Galileo and his demon telescope. House arrest could not arrest the idea, which would forever escape into the sciences, casting doubt on the centrality of man in the universe.

There is a word for this kind of paradigm shift: a "Copernican Revolution." Depending on who you talk to, history has had four or five paradigm shifts thus far:
 

1. Heliocentricism - Earth is not the center of the universe.
2. Darwinian Evolution - Man is not separate from the animals.
3. Nietzsche's Nihilism - Man's morality is relative.
4. Freud's Phycology - Man is not in control of his own thoughts.
5. The Theory of Relativity - The universe has no single reference frame (time is relative).
    

I propose that we are living through the sixth Copernican Revolution, the last and most terrible:

The AI Revolution - Creativity and rationality are algorithmic. They are processes wholly and completely reproducible in the physical world, governed by functions and statistics.

Of course, many philosophers have suspected this—it's hard to reject Descartes' dualism and not believe some version of the previous statement. But that doubt has not been fully substantiated until now. We had no proof. We had no telescope.

OpenAI (and all the rest) built our telescope. Every new update pokes another hole in the uniqueness of man's mental faculties: We can do math. So can they. We can do logic. So can they. We can write poetry and make movies. Computers are getting better at these by the day.

Computer has become Man, and in so doing, Man has become Computer.
 

"Terrible" can mean great but it can also mean terrible. There is great promise and peril in this technology, not least of which in our own psyche.

What does it mean to live a fully human, fully meaningful life, when all our processes of creating meaning can be automated?

What is the worth of man when computers can do all that makes us human and, quite possibly, better than we can?

Knowing that everything from our visual landscape to our very minds can be automated, how much further de-centered can we be from reality itself? (Consider here the sharp rise in internet discourse about living in a simulation or the viral sensation that is "the prompt theory").

These are the questions of today. Society must answer these questions, and they must answer them well. Otherwise, I fear, when the time comes to save ourselves, we may choose not to.