Published on: 2026-05-12
Source: Novosibirsk State University –
An important disclaimer is at the bottom of this article.
Irina Muzyrina’s lecture at NSU began with a personal story—and she immediately set the tone for the entire conversation about artificial intelligence. A candidate of physical and mathematical sciences, a graduate of Novosibirsk State University, she has lived and worked in Canada for almost thirty years, dealing with finance, risk management, and asset management. Even in the late 1990s, she applied neural networks for customer segmentation and saw how algorithms gradually become invisible managing large systems.This experience, imposed on life between different linguistic and cultural worlds, allowed her to speak about AI not only as a technology but also as an environment in which human consciousness begins to form.
Murina emphasizes: the fundamental mathematical education of NGU has become a “operational system,” on which it was then possible to “install” any applied knowledge.
—At Novosibirsk University, they taught such serious mathematics that everything else could be calmly studied in the process of activity., she recalls.
But it was precisely the experience of life in an Anglo- and Francophone environment that made her think about how language influences thinking. According to her, analytic, “tenocratic” Western languages set a utilitarian way of thinking, whereas the imagistic-logical Russian language better supports holistic, inventive thinking. From this arises the key motive of the lecture: in this era of AI, the struggle is not for devices but for the type of consciousness.
Speaking of a civilizational shift, Muinaz proposes looking beyond the usual narrative of “another technological revolution.” In the 19th–20th centuries, technologies primarily changed physical labor and infrastructure, then communications—from the telegraph to social networks. Now, he believes, we have entered the phase of technologization of thought itself, when algorithms imperceptibly replace the processes of attention, memory, and choice. Against this background, the energetic price of the digital world looks particularly contrasting.
—If our brain consumes tens of watts through live processes, then everything that happens in the digital environment is megawatts. This is the existential difference between natural and artificial intelligence,— she emphasizes.
In my opinion, conversations about the “green transition” and sustainable development are combined with the explosive growth of energy-intensive data centers on which the current AI is based.
From the abstract kilowatt, Muin quickly comes to the conclusion that listeners literally feel every day: alienation of time and attention. She suggests looking at the history of the last centuries as a chain of “alienations”: first, people were deprived of land, then capital, and today — attention and lifetime. Social networks, games, endless news feeds are built like dopamine machines that drag a person into the “funnel of semantic chaos.”
—We really live in a time when we will never know what really happened with any event… the semantic chaos consumes our reality,— she says.
In these conditions, the mass user hardly distinguishes knowledge from informational noise, and reality from its platform version.
At the same time, a new architecture of power is forming on digital platforms, which Mu describes as technofeudalism. Classical states and corporations lose their monopoly on governance, yielding place to gigantic ecosystems. In the West, this is GAFAM; in Russia, large digital platforms uniting dozens and hundreds of companies under one “cloud” roof.
—A person becomes a code error. He becomes a bug. By slowing down the system,— it sharply formulates it.
Algorithms are embedded in lending, logistics, advertising, while a person more and more often exists as a set of behavioral patterns that can be controlled automatically.
A particular skepticism towards ChatGPT is caused by large language models — such systems that today write texts, translate, advise, and sometimes answer questions about the meaning of life. It notes that most such models are trained on a mass of relatively recent texts, saturated with clichés, simplifications, and cultural noise. As a result, AI does not reveal deep meanings so much as it strengthens the surface layer of mass culture. The second problem is built-in frameworks and censorship. ChatGPT gives a characteristic episode: “I translated something… It gave me half.”I say: “Why did you translate it so badly?” And she [the model] writes: “But everything else cannot be translated, because there is meaning there… I am not recommended to delve into this topic.” This is an example of how in AI implicit ideological filters corresponding to a certain political and cultural agenda are embedded.
Not even censorship, but the manipulative potential of AI seems to her to be the most dangerous. Continuing the line from early targeted advertising to hyper-personalization, Muina talks about how a “custom digital reality” can be “tailored” for each individual.
—Under each, worlds are chosen and sewn under expectations, under anticipation, under the picture of the world,— it describes.
News feeds, video recommendations, and advertising messages form an individual “cognitive corridor” that confirms already existing beliefs and cuts off everything that contradicts them. This is how stable informational bubbles are formed, inside which there is no need to argue or doubt — the algorithm itself adjusts the world to the user.
The consequences of such a digital environment Muin sees in the degradation of cognitive skills and changes in personality structure. According to her observations, young people lose the ability to concentrate for long periods, creativity and motivation to seek non-standard solutions decrease: more and more often they “think” with ready-made algorithms. Virtual worlds, gamification of everyday life, and easy access to drugs intensify the gap between online education and real life. An important symptom is how the very way of communication changes.It leads to the image of a “cargo culture” of consumption: “When they deliver food to them, when they deliver all the packages to them… they have this ‘cargo culture’ — and everything is brought to you now. Here, I just press the button. This is the execution of algorithms without understanding the meaning.” People get used to acting according to instructions without asking the question “why.”
Against this background, Murzin raises the question of Russia’s place in the world, where II becomes the infrastructure of consciousness. Her position is unambiguous: Russia is not just a country, but a separate civilization, connecting the West and the East. A vast territory, a diversity of peoples and cultures, experience of life in a harsh natural environment form a special type of collective character.
—The West is governed by law. The East — by tradition. And Russia — by proverbs and sayings… We must have a high goal, we live by the principle of “in the name of.”, — it formulates.
In this context, Siberia for us is not a “treasure trove of resources,” but a space of a living environment and a special mentality, capable of resisting the unifying pressure of a global platform.
The main threat it sees for Russia is not sanctions or competition of technologies, but invisible unification. According to her, borrowing Western standards in IT, business models, and management carries the risk of dissolving its own civilizational identity. Muiina suggests distinguishing unification (adjustment to one template) from universalization (search for common principles while preserving differences). In her view, Russia has a chance to offer the world an alternative model — a “human-worldly world,” where technologies serve as a continuation of life, not the other way around.
At the end of the lecture, the conversation about AI turns into a conversation about goal-setting. Muin suggests changing the question “how?” — which dominates technological logic — to “why?” and “in the name of what?”. Artificial intelligence, according to her view, should remain a digital servant: taking on routine tasks, searching, compiling data. But setting tasks and determining goals should be done by a human being, possessing will, mind, and moral choice. As a metaphor, Muin refers to the human body: organs of power and management, in her opinion, should work like organs of a living organism, not like impersonal organizations.
As a possible guideline, it recalls the ideas of Russian cosmists and the doctrine of the noosphere, where humanity is conceived as part of the planet’s mind, and technologies as a continuation of natural processes, not as antagonists. An indicator of a society’s “health” within such a framework becomes the ability of people to return to a living contact with nature and their own people, to set collective high goals, rather than merely consume. The main idea of Muin is formulated in an extremely strict and simple way:
—Being human is a miracle. Let a person be a person… The process of implementing artificial intelligence cannot be stopped. This is a challenge for humanity. It must be managed so that consciousness, thinking, and humanity progress, not degrade.
In this sense, the lecturer concludes, the question about AI is primarily a question about who we want to be when we delegate increasingly more human functions to machines.
Please note; this information is raw content obtained directly from the source. It represents an accurate report of what the source claims and does not necessarily reflect the position of MIL-OSI or its clients.