The other day I came across a fast-food outlet replacing all its frontline personnel with artificial intelligence-driven kiosks. Overnight, the friendly greeting of the cashier was a computerized instruction. It was like viewing the future arriving in all the subtlety of a bulldozer—efficient, brutal, and totally insensitive.
We idealize progress as a shining, upward march. But what if the march steps on whom it vowed to lift? The rapid rush toward artificial intelligence potentially sends human workers not just away from menial work, but skilled work we long thought secure. Surely, modern AI trips over sarcasm and gets the subtleties of a child’s laughter wrong. That will change, though. The distinction between our present AI and the advanced monsters of the future is similar to that between a hulking puppy and a mature wolf. The question hanging over us is this: what happens when machines surpass us in intellect and speed, and no longer need our interfering hands?
The usual argument is that humans will just modify, switching to new functions just as they did during the Industrial Revolution. But that era’s machines didn’t possess cognitive ambition. They could not learn and strategize. Artificial intelligence, however, is no mere set of gears and levers. It evolves, swallows data like a glutton, and refines its algorithms without the need for human oversight. Unlike the smoke-belching factories of the 19th century, this time the machine doesn’t just displace us; it renders us irrelevant.
We’re already seeing the cracks. Writers, designers, and coders—occupations built on intellect and imagination—are now threatened by AI rivals that produce words and code with dazzling proficiency. Clerks for lawyers are pushed aside by computer software that reviews contracts quicker and without a whiff of human mistake. Even physicians and radiologists have to review AI diagnoses that do not provide even a flicker of doubt. Others might describe it as progress. Progress without sense is what, though? An empty hospital in which illness is cured by algorithms, but nobody stays to hold a shaking hand.
And when artificial intelligence reaches apotheosis at a point so high that it maintains and renovates itself without human intervention—our function fades to near nothing. It will code itself, correct its bugs, and possibly even forecast the next technological advancement. The codes will keep advancing their territory, creating new fields we can’t even understand or manage. Humanity, once the creator of its tools, will be an asterisk.
But the loss is more than economic. Work is not wages alone; it is identity. It is the dignity of the fisherman repairing his nets at dawn, the carpenter’s hands that shape wood into something productive. When people lose meaningful work, they lose dignity. When purpose is gone, so is the soul. We will be nourished, dressed, and amused by the mechanical courtesy of AI, but we will be hungry for meaning. A world without work is a world without discontent.
And maybe the greater danger is not the power of AI but the complacency it creates. We marvel at chatbots that write poetry and computers that mimic compassion, without recalling that mimicked warmth is empty. There are no dreams in any algorithm. There is no code warmed by sunlight. And still, we allow them in deeper, in the thrall of convenience. The price of that convenience will be our loss of humanness—slowly at first, and then suddenly.
The solution is not to blow up the machines or curse the code. Rather, we must reclaim our position as masters of technology, not slaves. AI must be a force that adds to human capacity, not a master that diminishes it. Labor rights, investment in retraining, and a dedication to upholding the dignity of labor are not suggestions—mandates. Let us build the future with purpose so that growth continues to be human in spirit. Because after the machines don’t need us anymore, they won’t care what they say. It will only matter what we’ve lost.
