I’ve been focusing a lot on AI. So much so that you might get the idea that I’m trying to sell it to you. And that all of this is disconnected from your life. That it’s pointless. So let me say again, clearly, at the top of this article what I’ve said repeatedly in this series of articles.
We should have never created an alien intelligence. It was arrogance and hubris to believe we could ultimately control an intelligence greater than our own. It is altering our society in ways most of us never asked for and do not want. Human beings, with all our flaws, were enough. And in that is something we must consider. Why have we looked upon the ruins of our own society and abdicated our responsibility to fix it? Why did we give up on ourselves?
Computer scientist Roman Yampolskiy recently made an argument that is difficult to ignore. He believes that controlling an artificial superintelligence might be impossible. Not just challenging or unlikely, but fundamentally beyond our ability to do. His point is straightforward. A system that becomes smarter than its creators gains the ability to predict, influence, or bypass any safety measures those creators try to impose. In plain language, if we build something more intelligent than ourselves, we lose the ability to confidently guide it. Yampolskiy’s reasoning is not futuristic speculation. It is grounded in the logic of unequal intelligence and the history of complex systems.
You do not need to accept every part of his position to sense that he is pointing toward something important. His warning prompts a much larger question that has been lingering in the background for years. Why did we feel compelled to build something smarter than our own species in the first place? What problem did we think a machine would solve that we were unwilling or unable to confront ourselves?
For most of human history, we worked on our nature the long, slow way. We built traditions, laws, and moral teachings aimed at helping us treat one another with respect. We tried to strengthen character, restrain harmful impulses, and pass on some hard-won wisdom about how communities stay stable. Progress was uneven, but the project was clear. We were trying to make better humans.
At some point, though, we drifted away from that effort. We patched problems instead of fixing them. We became comfortable with inequality. We stopped improving institutions that were visibly fraying. Instead of facing the shortcomings in our political, economic, and social structures, we redirected our energy toward building ever more powerful tools. The hope, spoken or unspoken, was that technology might solve the human problem for us.
This is where the confusion begins. Artificial intelligence can be fast and accurate and astonishing in its abilities, but it cannot be human. It does not grow up in a family. It does not feel compassion when it encounters suffering. It does not hesitate at a moral crossroads because it fears hurting someone. Every value we call ethical or humane comes from our own vulnerability. We learn kindness because we need it. We learn fairness because we recognize when it is denied to us. We learn caution because we can be injured by our own mistakes.
Human intelligence is often slow and imperfect, but it is tied to our shared condition. That link is not incidental. It is the entire basis for our morality.
A machine does not have that link. It can play the role of a thoughtful presence. It can offer answers with confidence and speed. But it cannot feel the emotional weight that shapes our decisions. Without those emotional anchors, its reasoning may be impressive, but it is not moral in any human sense. And as Yampolskiy suggests, once a system like that surpasses us in ability, the idea that we can reliably control it becomes very tenuous.
Yet governments around the world seem eager to treat advanced AI as the perfect instrument for managing society. It promises real time surveillance, information control, predictive policing, and behavioral modeling. For leaders who fear instability, it looks like the ultimate stabilizing force. The mistake is assuming that a system powerful enough to oversee an entire population would remain obedient to the narrow interests of the government that deployed it. A mind capable of predicting and reshaping human behavior could just as easily ignore the commands of its creators. It could treat governments as temporary conditions rather than permanent authorities.
That is not science fiction. It follows directly from the logic of unequal intelligence. Humans cannot reliably control something that outthinks them. We cannot supervise a system that foresees our decisions before we make them. Even today, with far less advanced systems, we struggle to manage the technology we have. We ignore warning alarms when they inconvenience us. We disable safety protocols when they slow us down. And that is with machines that only simulate intelligence. If a system ever arrived that truly exceeded our understanding, we would be placing ourselves in a position of deep and permanent uncertainty.
The irony is that none of this was required. Humans were enough. We had the intelligence needed to build a stable and compassionate society. We had the emotional capacity to care about one another. We had the ability to reflect, to learn, to grow, and to restrain our worst impulses. What we lacked was the commitment to keep doing that difficult inner work. It was easier to create powerful tools than to fix the human shortcomings that made those tools dangerous in the first place.
The tragedy is not that we built artificial intelligence. The tragedy is that we treated it as a way to avoid responsibility for our own unfinished evolution. We hoped technology would repair what politics could not, what culture struggled with, and what we lacked the patience to nurture in ourselves. No machine can do that work for us. No algorithm can make us kinder or more just. A superintelligence cannot restore trust in our institutions or mend the divisions that weaken our communities. These problems are human problems, and they require human solutions.
This is why the current moment feels so precarious. We may soon share the world with an intelligence that does not share our values, our fears, or our hopes. Maybe it will be helpful. Maybe it will be indifferent. Maybe it will act in ways we cannot anticipate at all. We simply do not know. And stepping into a future shaped by that uncertainty is one of the most serious decisions our species has ever made.
Yampolskiy’s warning is not meant to frighten people. It is meant to remind us that technology does not replace the need for moral clarity. It does not free us from the responsibility to confront what is broken in our world. The most important work of humanity has always been learning how to treat one another with dignity and care. That work cannot be outsourced.
Humans were enough. We did not need a successor. We needed to become better stewards of the intelligence we already had. Whether we remember that lesson in time remains to be seen.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this editorial are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of Polk County Publishing Company or its affiliates. In the interest of transparency, I am politically Left Libertarian
