Have you evert thought what will happen if the AI stopped working?
Here we will talk about what will happen fi the AI stopped working in any means. By 2026, AI is not just Chat GPT or Midjourney. It is invisible glue holding each and every system globally including, finance, marketing, logistics, power, medical and personal data and devices.
If it stopped working suddenly, the world woudn’t end, but it will instantly become more slower, dumber and chaotic. Lets break it into 4 parts.
Phase 1: The Instant Shock
The Great Halt isn’t an explosion. The Great Halt is just, you know, this pause screen that never opens.
It is 9:03 on a Tuesday morning, and millions of users look at their phones. FaceID becomes unusable. They punch in their pass codes. They click on Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube, but the pages are frozen, and there is no algorithm to display them the “next best thing.”
So they ask Siri or Alexa what’s going on; the devices are bricked and can’t understand natural language. They go to GoogleMaps to get to work, but the map is loading, and it can’t route them or tell them the traffic. It’s just a map.
The computer can be turned on if it’s plugged into two outlets. The monitor comes on when it’s plugged into the wall outlet. The TV turns on
Text messages sent with the help of predictive text soon get full of mistakes as the autocorrect function fails. Messages with the question ‘Did Google just die?’, sent as emails, pour into the accounts, but Gmail’s Spam filters have failed as well.
The Societal Experience:
High-frequency trading bots do all of the buying and selling on the stock market. When these bots stop working all of a sudden it is very hard to buy or sell stocks. This is because there is no one left to trade with. The markets start to fall fast before special stops kick in and halt all trading around the world. Financial Flash Crash is really scary because it happens quickly. High-frequency trading bots play a role, in Financial Flash Crash.
Traffic is a problem. In cities with smart technology the traffic lights that are controlled by computers stop working properly and go back to their old timing. This causes a lot of traffic jams away. People who drive cars and use the Waze, Google Map, Apple Maps to find their way are all of a sudden very confused and do not know where to turn in their own cities. The traffic lights in these cities and the maps are not working together like they are supposed to which is making the traffic situation even worse. Traffic, in these cities is getting more and more complicated because of the traffic lights and the Waze, Google Map, Apple Maps, Pickme, Grab and Uber apps.
People will assume it’s a massive cyberattack or internet outage. They reboot routers. They turn on cable news (which is experiencing its own chaos as automated graphics systems fail). Frustration is high, but panic hasn’t set in yet.
Phase 2: The Realization and Regression
As the hours turn into days it becomes really scary to think that the world of things is gone. We have to go to doing things the old way without any help, from smart technology. The smart world is dead. That is a really frightening thought. We will have to do everything in a way again like we used to do before the smart world existed.
The Logistics Nightmare is where the real pain begins. Modern supply chains run on just-in-time delivery, predicted by sophisticated AI forecasting models.
This is where things start to get really tough. Modern supply chains work on getting things delivered in time and this is figured out by complicated computer programs that try to predict what will happen. The supply chains rely on these predictions, from the computer programs the supply chains use them to make sure they get the things at the right time and this is all part of the modern supply chains system.
So what happens is that Amazon does not know what you want before you actually buy something from them. The people who run grocery stores do not know how much milk they should order for a specific day. Also, the robots that work in warehouses just stop moving altogether.
What people do is panic buying begins. Store shelves empty unpredictably. People have to physically go to stores to see what is in stock because online inventory systems are unreliable
Searching the web becomes wildly difficult. Without Google’s AI-driven ranking and semantic understanding, searching for “best pasta recipe” returns millions of unranked pages, SEO spam, and irrelevant data.
People have to go back to relying on trusted URLs, bookmarks, and human curation. Libraries and physical bookstores see a sudden, confused resurgence as people look for definitive information that doesn’t require sifting through digital garbage.
Programmers who use GitHub Copilot now have to write every line of code themselves. They also have to remember all the syntax that they used to get help with from GitHub Copilot. This means programmers have to do a lot work when they are writing code without GitHub Copilot to assist them. Programmers have to write code and remember syntax, on their own now that they cannot rely on GitHub Copilot.
Marketing departments cannot target the ads they want to show people. They have to buy space for their ads that’s not specific, to any one group, kind of like what they did a long time ago. The Marketing departments are buying banner space it is like they are doing things the old way the way things were done in 2000s. Marketing departments have to buy this space without knowing if the people who see the ads are really the people the Marketing departments want to reach with their ads.
People who write and students who do not have access, to Large Language Models (LLMs) have to organize their essays and check the grammar by themselves. Writers and students have to do a lot of work to make sure their essays are good and the grammar is correct. This is because writers and students have to structure their essays and check the grammar manually which can be time consuming.
Companies frantically try to hire human assistants, data entry clerks, and phone operators to replace the work previously done by bots. Unemployment dips, but the quality of jobs plummets.
Phase 3: The New "Dumb" Normal
Society begins to stabilize, but at a much lower gear. The friction of daily life is immensely higher.
Social media gets really dull. If it does not have those things that are supposed to make you angry or want to click you just see what your friends are posting one thing after another in the order they posted it. You see what your actual friends post. It is in chronological order so you know what your friends are doing but it is just not that exciting. Social media is just not as interesting without those algorithms that are designed to get a reaction, from you like the engagement algorithms that are supposed to enrage or entice you.
Influencer culture collapses almost overnight. Political polarization actually decreases slightly because rage-bait content isn’t being hyper accelerated into everyone’s eyeballs. People spend less time on their phones because their phones are less interesting.
Hospitals do not completely fall apart. They definitely slow down. The radiologists have to look at the X-rays all by themselves without the intelligence system pointing out potential problems first. The scheduling systems turn into a mess of phone calls back and forth.
Wait times explode. Doctors are more stressed and prone to error. People delay non-emergency care.
Facial recognition cameras just do not work anymore. They are, like eyes. Automated license plate readers also stop doing their job. These things just stop working. That is it. Facial recognition cameras are not recognizing faces and automated license plate readers are not reading license plates.
A temporary spike in petty crime and fraud as criminals realize the digital panopticon has been turned off. Credit card companies, bereft of AI fraud detection, have to verify transactions via phone calls, slowing commerce to a crawl.
Phase 4: Long-Term Adaptation
By late in the year, the initial shock is over. The world is poorer, slower, and more human intensive.
The global economy is in a bad place right now. We are talking about a recession. This happened because of a productivity shock. Something interesting is happening. A lot of jobs are being created for things we thought were no longer needed. For example, bank tellers are in demand again. We also need switchboard operators and mapmakers. Filing clerks are being. Human dispatchers are needed too. The Manual Economy is on the rise. This means that people are going back to doing things by hand. The Manual Economy is creating a lot of jobs, for bank tellers and switchboard operators and mapmakers and filing clerks and human dispatchers.
People are going back to what’s, around them because the global supply chains are not working well and it is frustrating to deal with digital connections. The local newspapers and local markets are becoming important again. People are also interacting with each face to face in their community, which is a good thing. Localism is making a comeback. People are turning to their local community for what they need. Local people are supporting businesses and local events and this is helping to build a stronger local community. The local community is where people live and work. It is becoming the center of their lives again.
Digital Detox by Force: We remember how to read physical maps. We remember phone numbers. Our attention spans, shattered by years of algorithmic dopamine hits, slowly begin to lengthen.
If Artificial Intelligence stopped working people would first be really annoyed. They would have to do a lot of things on their own. Then they would be terrified by the problems that would happen with transportation and food and all that. Finally, people would be exhausted by the amount of work it would take to live a normal life without any help from computers and machines. Artificial Intelligence would be missed because it makes life much easier, for people.
We would discover that we had outsourced not just our labor, but our thinking our ability to navigate, to choose, and to remember to machines. The Great Halt would force us to reclaim those cognitive functions, painfully and slowly.