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

AI is the first technology whose explosive development has exposed the crisis of values and cultural reference points in modern civilization 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, m...