What if AI’s greatest threat is what it reveals about us?

The debate over artificial intelligence provides an opportunity to think about something more important than the latest arguments among American politicians and technology oligarchs because AI occupies a unique place in the history of humanity’s relationship with its inventions.

AI isn’t really a mind, but more a mirror, as it doesn’t exist independently of us but reflects human thought, including all the good and bad we have accumulated. Unlike the wheel, the printing press, the internal combustion engine or the nuclear reactor, AI can’t be separated from humanity, so to borrow Marxist terminology, it isn’t “alienated” from its creator.

The enormous quantity of data we produce every second undoubtedly falls increasingly into the hands of technology monopolies and this has helped create the persistent fear that AI will somehow abolish humanity, stripping people of their identities and eventually making them redundant.

But the machine, or more precisely its creators and owners, still requires human beings to produce the data on which it depends, meaning the texts, images and solutions generated by AI remain intimately connected with human thoughts and feelings and with the accumulated knowledge through which humanity has interpreted the world. So therefore there’s little reason to conclude that AI will abolish humanity as the principal creator of the reality around us.

The same applies to international politics where we should be skeptical of claims that weaker countries will inevitably fall under the control of those possessing the most powerful data centers and computing infrastructure, because politics still takes precedence over technology and the decision to become dependent on another power is ultimately political.

The Gulf monarchies, for example, are developing American AI infrastructure partly because their relationship with Washington is already based on security, so they increasingly see such infrastructure as another form of American presence, comparable in some respects to US military bases.