OPINION | Is AI a tool for growth or a threat to humanity?

For six millennia, humanity has evolved slowly, painfully, and beautifully. We learned to cultivate land, build cities, create laws, compose music, write poetry, and ask questions about the meaning of existence. We moved from cave walls to cathedrals, from tribal memory to written knowledge, and from myth to science.

Each step forward was not merely technological but civilisational. It represented an expansion of consciousness as much as capability. Today, however, we stand at a paradoxical threshold.

Never before has human progress accelerated so rapidly, and never before has our sense of the future been so uncertain. The source of this unease is not famine, war, or plague, but something we ourselves have created:artificial intelligence(AI). The great debates of our time are no longer only about economic growth or political ideology.

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They are existential. What kind of future will we inhabit? What kind of future do we want?

And perhaps most unsettling of all, will humanity remain the primary intelligence shaping that future? The question of whether AI might “take over” is often framed in science fiction extremes, with machines ruling the world or replacing humans. Yet the deeper issue is subtler and already unfolding.

Control does not require domination. It can arise through dependency. When human judgment is replaced by algorithmic recommendation, when human creativity is overshadowed by automated generation, and when human meaning is outsourced to machine optimisation, authority quietly shifts.

The danger is not that AI becomes human, but that humans become mechanical. There is a profound difference between artificial and organic intelligence. AI is computational, an extraordinary extension of logic, pattern recognition, and efficiency.

It is intellect amplified, but it is not consciousness. It does not experience awe, compassion, moral struggle, or transcendence. It does not love.

It does not suffer. It does not hope. AI can simulate empathy, but it does not feel it.

It can compose words about beauty, but it does not behold beauty. It can model ethics, but it does not carry moral responsibility. Humans, by contrast, are not merely biological processors competing with silicon ones.

We are living consciousness. We carry imagination, intuition, memory, and meaning within us. If we forget, if we begin to see ourselves as inferior versions of our machines and as slow processors needing algorithmic guidance, we risk surrendering the very qualities that define us.

Efficiency may replace wisdom. Prediction may replace imagination. Optimisation may replace meaning.

In that quiet exchange, the authorship of the human story could slip from human hands. Yet this trajectory is not inevitable.Technology has always been a tool shaped by values. The printing press did not abolish thought.

It multiplied it. Electricity did not replace humanity. It extended human possibility. AI, too, can remain what it should be: an instrument serving human flourishing rather than defining it.

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