Imagine if a bunch of billionaires and large corporations got together and tried to push a shiny Black Box on the world. It would require that electricity production be doubled. It would take 20% of fresh water. The positive claims for it are that it would reduce work loads for humans. It would be inventive, smart, and powerful. And that’s all you know about the Black Box. Would you buy it?
This is AI, or the new Artificial Intelligence. It’s promoted as a sort of one-size-fits-all panacea for mankind. AI is training the Black Box to think more like a human, but still only being a Black Box that is limited to the data it is fed. The selling point is that AI can then replace humans in jobs.
“We believe that it is possible that deep learning systems are less than a decade away from superintelligence,” Pachocki added. He described superintelligence as systems smarter than humans across a large number of critical actions. [https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/28/sam-altman-says-openai-will-have-a-legitimate-ai-researcher-by-2028/]
Is there a need for AI? Do we need to replace humans in jobs? Are there down sides to the Black Box? Take for example a newly graduated student. He needs to make a resume. So he asks the Black Box to make him a resume after feeding it bits and pieces that need to be put together to impress a company enough to hire him. The AI quickly spits out an impressive looking resume, and off it goes to several companies. These companies are swamped with impressive looking AI-generated resumes, so it uses AI to process them and pick the best candidates for each job. Is this an improvement of some sort thanks to the Black Box? No. The resume does not represent the actual human. The companies are using the Black Box to decide which human is best to work in a human job. The Black Box only knows data. It does not know people.
Certainly there are good uses for AI, perhaps in the military to replace a human that would be in a dangerous situation. AI can look through data faster than a human, so looking for a medicine to fit a particular disease could be speeded up. But that is not how AI is being sold. It is being sold as a universal panacea. Its goal is to replace people with a more intelligent, capable employee that doesn’t need to be paid. This is why the corporations and billionaires are so excited about AI.
But there are many down sides to replacing humans. AI is not human. It does not know what unemployment is like, for instance. It does not know human to human interaction. It is an attempt to make humans unnecessary. “The promise of automation was to do the mundane so human creativity can flourish. Instead human creativity is demeaned as mundane so Big Tech’s machines can flourish.” [Thinking Like a Human,, by David Weitzner, p. 114]
Do we need a Black Box that sucks up half of our electricity and 20% of our water? Are the promoters of the Black Box pushing it for personal benefit instead of societal improvement? These are things that need to be considered and thought through before we just give in to all the hype.
