AI and the Vanity of our Drive for Progress

There’s a Greek myth that speaks more clearly about our age than any UN report. Prometheus, the Titan who stole fire from the gods, gifted humanity the power of technology. But every gift comes with a price. Fire made humans freer and yet more vulnerable. It brought warmth and light, the ability to cook, but also destruction, war, and devastation on a scale previously unimaginable. Today, we face a new Promethean dilemma: artificial intelligence.

Listen to the world’s leading AI researchers, and you hear a common refrain: we have unleashed a power we cannot fully control. The optimism of two decades ago that careful design would make AI safe, has given way to apocalyptic realism. We don’t know how to make AI safe. Laws are missing, oversight is slow, and yet civilization races toward the edge without any brakes.

Modern man believes everything must be manageable, controllable, and subject to human will. We trust ethics committees, certifications, and international conventions to tame the storm of technology, yet AI, in its present and future superintelligent forms, defies such faith. Expecting to write rules for such an entity is as absurd as a dog drafting a code of conduct for its master.

Within a few years, AI could render most human labor obsolete. We already see the signs: AI drafting legal documents, assisting diagnoses, and generating art. It isn’t only manual labor that disappears but also intellectual labor, once the domain of the educated elite. What becomes of a society in which labor is no longer necessary, yet remains the foundation of dignity, identity, and social cohesion? The ancient question of meaning returns with a merciless sharpness: if work is gone, what remains of life?

The Greeks answered that leisure, scholè, was the source of philosophy and art. Modern man, however, has anchored the soul in productivity. Remove that productivity, and you don’t get a society of poets and thinkers, but emptiness, resentment, and possibly violence. Why, then, do we not stop? Why do the smartest engineers and entrepreneurs continue to build systems that may eventually replace us? Because we are addicted to progress. Technology has become a kind of religion. AI is the new Messiah. Just as the medieval mind couldn’t question God, the modern mind cannot question technological salvation.

Every faith has heretics and prophets of doom. Warnings that progress can bring destruction are dismissed as alarmism. History, however, is filled with civilizations undone by their creations. Rome by its military machine, the Soviet Union by its centralizing technology, and the West now by algorithms. The deeper problem is that modern man has lost any sense of limitation. We live in an age where “no” is an obstacle to overcome. Nature mustn’t remain wild. The body mustn’t remain untended. The mind mustn’t remain unshaped. Yet boundaries provide direction, form ethics, and protect us from ourselves. Without them, freedom collapses into chaos.

AI confronts us with the ultimate limit: human controllability. The idea that humanity would remain the planet’s most intelligent species was so self-evident that no one spoke it aloud. Now, that monopoly is slipping. A radical shift follows. No longer is man the measure of all things; a machine which is smarter, faster, and tireless may hold that role.

What we witness is, at its core, an ancient motif, namely the tragedy of hubris. Like Icarus flying too close to the sun, and the Tower of Babel collapsing, humanity now flirts with digital wings. The history of technology is a history of promises and catastrophes. Time and again, we believed we could reap the benefits without paying the cost. Time and again, we underestimated what we unleashed. Our political institutions are hopelessly slow compared to the pace of technological revolutions. While policymakers debate in four-year cycles, AI leaps forward in four-month increments. By the time democratic oversight, or even ethical guidelines appear, the next generation of models has already surpassed the last. Democratic control risks becoming an illusion. Hope doesn’t lie in the illusion that technology can be fully controlled or reversed. Hope lies in reclaiming what it means to be human. If labor disappears and machines surpass our intellect, we must find value elsewhere. Not in efficiency but meaning, and not in productivity but wisdom.

A cultural revolution deeper than any AI regulation: a return to friendship, love, beauty, and truth. These are human experiences that cannot be automated. The threat of AI may force us to rediscover that being human isn’t synonymous with producing, consuming, or competing. Sometimes that means deliberately choosing not to use AI, even when faster or cheaper. AI acts as a mirror, revealing the vanity of our drive for progress, the emptiness of a life centered on work and consumption, and the dangers of politics perpetually lagging behind. It forces us to revisit the philosophical question that has occupied minds for millennia: what is the good life?

Perhaps this is the only way to manage Prometheus’ fire: transforming ourselves, embracing limits, choosing wisdom over power, and recognizing that progress without reflection is nothing but a faster road to the abyss. The last freedom we still possess is the freedom to not do everything we can.