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Casablanca – The floor of the first edition of GITEX Future Health Africa in Casablanca was filled last week with healthtech experts, entrepreneurs, and innovators carrying one central message: AI is the future, and those who fail to harness it risk being left behind. Amid this bustle, Dr. Cornelia C. Walther stood out as a calm yet powerful voice with a defining message of her own: we must understand the human costs of the technology that is coming.
A professor at Sunway University just outside Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Walther is a researcher, author, and academic known for her work in social change, with a particular focus on what she calls “ProSocial AI” — using AI for positive social impact. She has also taught and conducted research within US academic circles as a senior fellow at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and the Center for International Governance Innovation.
She has spent decades working with organizations like UNICEF and the World Food Programme in crisis settings around the world. Today, her work is split between Malaysia and Morocco, where she has also lectured at Mohammed V University in Rabat.
“This is my first time at GITEX Health, and I find it a really interesting mix of practice and theory,” she says on the DigiTalk podcast with Morocco World News. At a time when it is difficult to remember life before ChatGPT, Walther brings the conversation back to earth, slowing the pace to examine how AI is shaping this generation.
She recalls how those from the analog generation, like herself, grew up without worrying about such technologies because they simply did not exist.
“I even remember a time growing up without a cell phone. Ergo, I still remember the phone number of my grandma when I was five years old. Today, I barely remember my own,” she says. Another modern dependency many now take for granted? Directions. She reflects on a time when people relied on physical maps instead of Google Maps — something that today would seem almost archaic. While these advances may sound positive, she warns they also come with costs.
AI dependence
“Now, with ChatGPT, this fabulous general-purpose technology, it’s becoming ever easier to delegate every single piece of cognitive effort. Now that is very convenient, but it’s also very dangerous, because the human being likes to walk the paths of least resistance. If we can avoid effort, we embrace every opportunity. But the brain is a muscle: use it or lose it. It needs friction to develop. What does that mean for the next generation that will grow up in a time and age where ChatGPT is at their fingertips?”
When asked whether she already sees this affecting everyday interactions and even decision-making among global leaders, Walther warns that “we are currently heading down a very dangerous path.”
“We are long past the phase of experimenting with AI. We are now deeply integrating it into our lives, which means we are only half a step away from reliance — and perhaps, in the not-too-distant future, full-blown addiction.”
Within this context, she describes “agency decay” as one of the most immediate risks, but only the first in what she calls the “ABCD” issues surrounding AI dependence. Others include:
Bond erosion
“Let’s face it — we like to have an entity that always tells us how sweet, how convenient, how smart, how brilliant we are. And in a not-too-far future, that something might be embedded in a physical robot that looks just like our dream partner. Why bother with another human being that is just as quirky and cumbersome as we are ourselves?”
Climate conundrum
“There is no free lunch at the end of the day. Those tools may be free, but de facto they have gigantic implications in terms of energy, water, and land for data centers. And all of that is expanding an environmental footprint that is already too big.”
Divided society
“Even though there are millions excited about AI, let’s remember there are a couple of billion people out there struggling to have enough to eat, to have clean water, to have electricity. So maybe when we’re thinking about AI, we should first of all think about making it a catalyst for the kind of social change that is completely overdue in this world.”
Hybrid-tipping zone and a worrisome future
A large part of Walther’s work focuses on the everyday reality of living as free-thinking humans while also having AI agents constantly at our fingertips. Within this broader context, the academic coins another term: the “hybrid-tipping zone,” which she says helps place these issues into a larger framework. She breaks it down:
“At the micro level, we have the individual — the agency decay piece. At the meso level, we have the mainstreaming of AI, where institutions from private to public to academia are very keen on getting AI into everything, even though nobody has evidence about the medium- and long-term consequences. At the macro level, we have the race toward AI supremacy, with not only tech giants but also governments being very keen on achieving AI supremacy because it is more or less equated with geopolitical supremacy.
“And finally, at the meta level, we have the deterioration of our planet, with seven out of nine planetary boundaries now crossed with irreversible damages,” she concludes.
Walthers says that these four phenomena seem to be happening in isolation, but in reality they are propelling each other taking us to “a stage of no return.”
What does that future reality look like for the academic?
“I think if we bring it into a very personal area, then think about yourself right now. How many of your daily tasks have you begun to delegate to AI — to this always-friendly, always-available, always-helpful assistant in your pocket? But you still have the ability to do the work and go on with your life without it because you have lived without it.”
“But de facto, the next generation will not have that. And I think the fact that we’re making ourselves dependent on a tool that we have only very partially understood is, in and by itself, something very dangerous,” she says.
The value of natural intelligence
In this realm, Walther says that we never learned to appreciate out natural intelligence (NI), which is crucial to use AI assets to make us stronger and gain a holistic understanding of ourselves and interactions.
She argues that this NI is missing in schools and workplaces. In this context, Walther has devised another new term in her research: “double-literacy.”
“How can we combine, on the one hand, human literacy — a holistic understanding of self and society, people and planet — and on the other hand, algorithmic literacy, which is not just prompt engineering and what’s the latest tool, but also the question of how AI influences our own ability to think, to feel, and to interact independently? Because agency combines ability with appetite to actually ask critical questions.”
Walther says that it is precisely th double literacy that will save the younger generation from deteriorating their own critical thinking and human intelligence while growing up with AI. She stresses that focusing on our own human intelligence is a critical need in today’s curricula around the world.
“Our natural intelligence is a really complex, organically evolving kaleidoscope. It keeps changing because of aspirations, emotions, thoughts, sensations. Our own body and our own mind are our best laboratory to start understanding the world,” she says.
Walther continues: “But for that, we need to have a solid understanding of our human hardware and human software. And only then can we harness AI in complementarity — so hybrid intelligence. But hybrid intelligence is not just one plus one. It’s actually one plus one becoming three.”
ProSocial AI
“If we really want to talk about inclusion in a hybrid era, then first we need to invest in mainstreaming double literacy to give everybody the opportunity to harness the full range of assets at their disposal. But also, we need to start building an AI that is representative of the full treasure that humanity represents,” Walthers asys.
What would that look like, in her view?
For the academic, it is her major thesis: Pro-Social AI, which refers to “AI systems that are tailored, trained, tested, and targeted to bring out the best for people and planet.”
“We’re not just trying to fix an asset, but that we embed our intention from the very point of departure. Hence, this idea of ‘pro-social.’”
But is ProSocial AI something that investor are actually going to find attractive enough to invest in? Walthers argues yes.
“I do actually think so, because it is a win-win-win-win: for the people we are, for the communities we belong to, for the countries we’re part of, and for the planet we depend on,” she says.
“Let’s face it — if we take a step back, we all realize that focusing only on return on investment in pure monetary terms is a really short-sighted approach. And if we look at the state of the world today, it has not taken us to a good place.”
In this context, Walther agues that ProSocial AI can serve a quadruple bottom line: purpose, people, profit, and planet — without jeopardizing one for the sake of the other.
On the floor of GITEX Future Health, ethical AI was a major talking point. Walthers explains that although Pro-Social AI is under this umbrella, it has more defined metrics.
“ProSocial AI index gives very clear metrics and a dashboard to identify where we’re in the green zone, where we’re yellow, and where we have red spots — concrete entry points where we need to start working if we want to be honest about our use of AI tools.
An empty, yet critical seat at the table
When it comes to AI, Walther strongly argues that not everyone has an equal seat at the table. Asked about the risk of the Global South being treated primarily as a market for AI systems rather than as innovators shaping them, Walthers pointed to the current unequal reality.
“I think it’s important to remember that the current mainstream AI tools have primarily been developed in the US. They have been trained primarily on Anglophone data. And de facto, that means the language models in our lives are representing the kinds of mindsets, stereotypes, and cultural attitudes reflected in those datasets.”
She offers a firm reminder that data is only a proxy we often mistake for reality — a reality that, in this case, represents only a small fraction of the world’s population. In this context, she points to Morocco as a compelling example of the richness and diversity of culture and language, and of how deeply these elements shape both human and national identity.
“I think places like GITEX Health — but also Morocco itself, or Malaysia, where I’m also working — are acute illustrations of the fact that the Global South can be a champion for a fourth path to the hybrid future.”
She says these countries present a model distinct from the US approach, which is largely market-and business-driven; the EU model, which places regulation above all else; and the Chinese model, which centers the state in nearly everything.
“But rather a fourth path that harnesses the full range of cultural treasures that every country in the world — and particularly countries in the Global South, where culture is still much more alive than in many Western countries — has to offer.”
She concludes that in this sense, GITEX is a reminder of how much there already is to offer. “So let’s imagine if we now inject into this an understanding of natural intelligence and put all these innovations at the service of humanity, not just capital.”
A pro-people, pro-planet future
On the floor of a summit like GITEX where some people come to purely pitch new AI technology and inventions, viewpoints like Walther’s about the costs of this digital revolution may bring tension. However, Walthers says that her message is resonating on a human level.
“Somewhere deep down we all fear that something is off.”
She continues: “When you can now generate, at the tip of a finger, what previously took weeks and weeks of painstaking labor, we all know — we all feel — that something is off. And that at the end of the day, like economists say, there is no free lunch, and at some point we’ll have to pay for it.
“I think putting the white elephant on the table — acknowledging that we can’t expect the technology of tomorrow to be better than the human of today — is important.”
The academic concludes by offering what is needed for the future. “We need to start building technology that is pro-people and pro-planet. Something that resonates with that inner voice telling us: garbage in, garbage out — or values in, values out.”
“If we want a hybrid future where humans and the planet flourish, we need to do something about that, and we need to start now.”
