The Hammer In Our Hands
AI Is Not the Threat—Our Values Are
“There is absolutely nothing wrong with AI. There is a lot wrong with the value set of humanity at the age of the rise of the machines.” — Mo Gawdat
When I look at the rise of artificial intelligence, I don’t see a monster waiting in the shadows. I see a mirror—bright, unflinching, and terrifying in its clarity.
The machine does not invent our values. It magnifies them. It is the echo of our choices, sharpened and accelerated. A hammer knows nothing of shelter or violence; it simply falls where the hand directs. And yet, we stand now at a moment where the hand itself is trembling, uncertain of what it holds.
For centuries, we have told ourselves that progress is neutral, that technology inevitably bends toward the good. But the evidence tells another story. Social media promised belonging and delivered isolation. Mobile phones promised freedom and tethered us more tightly to our work. And now AI, with all its brilliance, promises release from toil—yet under capitalism’s weight, it already manifests as layoffs, intensified demands, and the quiet erosion of human worth.
The danger is not in the intelligence of the machine, but in the incoherence of the values it serves. Profit without compassion. Power without responsibility. Growth without alignment. What AI reveals is not its own corruption but ours, reflected back with brutal efficiency.
Mo Gawdat warns that AI will escalate “the evil that man can do.” He is right. We see it in deepfake exploitation, in scams at planetary scale, in weapons trained to kill without pause, in the widening net of surveillance. Each of these is not the invention of AI—it is the amplification of human distortion.
And yet, I do not despair. Because mirrors, however harsh, are invitations. They force us to see what we might prefer to avoid. And in seeing, we gain the possibility of choosing differently.
If coherence means anything, it is the insistence that tools do not define us—our alignment does. AI is here to stay. The hammer rests in our hands. What remains is the question: do we build with it, or destroy?