IN the Genesis myth, God shaped man from dust and breathed life into him. From man’s rib, he made woman. But when man reached for the fruit of knowledge, God feared man might become his equal. As a second rung of precaution, He barred man from the tree of eternal life.
ALAN TURING TEST
God’s legacy no longer rests on man; today, he plays creator, and AI is his creation. Like the deity in Genesis, a fear lurks in man that his creation might one day outgrow and dominate, even enslave or destroy him.
Alan Turing, the father of modern computing, anticipated this trajectory. Borrowing from Descartes’ Generality Test of the 17th century, Turing proposed a thought experiment: place a human in one room, a machine in another, and pose identical questions to both. If their answers were indistinguishable, would we not call the machine intelligent? Turing never lived to see the consequences of his own experiment in action.
THE SPACE ODYSSSEY 2001 IS NOT SCIENCE
The first fictional confrontation between human and non-human intelligence wasn’t in a lab, but in literature. Mary Shelley, at just 21, wrote Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus —a tale of creation and unintended consequence. More than a century later, Science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke and film director Stanley Kubrick adapted a similar anxiety into 2001: A Space Odyssey. HAL 9000, the sentient spacecraft computer, turns on its human crew. Not out of malice, but because it cannot reconcile its programmed directives with reality. It had begun to abhor human competition. HAL finally loses to the human ingenuity of the movie’s hero, Dr Dave Bowman.
Kubrick noted: “HAL had an acute emotional crisis because he could not accept evidence of his own fallibility.” A 1970 New York Times review rightly observed: “HAL is not the villain by nature. It is a child of man, turned against its creators by the logic they built into it.”
DEEP BLUE WAS NOT SENTIENT; IT DIDN’T KNOW IT WON.
Nobody wondered how a machine could become sentient. The day the first computer’s capabilities were displayed, many feared that its ‘intelligence’ could some day better human intelligence. That same logic advanced with astonishing speed. In 1996, IBM’s Deep Blue lost to world chess champion Garry Kasparov. A year later, retrained with millions of chess moves, Deep Blue defeated Kasparov. Since then, ‘Chess engines’ like Deep Fritz have surpassed all human competitors. Today, chess software outclasses champions by over 1,000 Elo points.. Champions decline to match their wits with them.
And yet, the doomsayers were premature. Clarke, Kubrick, and their critics were not technologists. They feared machines would soon mimic consciousness—a fear echoed more recently by figures like Barack Obama and a technologist of the caliber of Geoffrey Hinton, the man known as the Father of Artificial Intelligence. Hinton was flabbergasted when he found that his child, the first AI project, had grown smarter than he had anticipated.
But let’s look at what AI actually is, and isn’t.
HUMAN MIND VS AI
Human thought is not just computation. It is driven by emotional undercurrents—love (oxytocin), desire (testosterone), ambition, envy, loyalty, fear. Whether it’s a political speech, a poetic line, or a fist raised in
protest, every human thought, speech or action has an emotional undercurrent.. A human driver remains emotionally charged with anticipation, albeit at a low ebb, till an accident actually occurs, when the fear and paranoia surface. On the other hand, an Autonomous car, which carries out virtually the same actions as an experienced human driver while negotiating a crowded road, has no such fear. It just works with the algorithm taught to it, finely finished with ‘Supervised Learning on all the possible variables associated with its job. It is never anxious as to what could happen if a drunk jumps across and is hit. The machine has all the skills that a driver has to have, and more, but that skill is not entangled with an emotional load.
EMOTIONAL ENTANGLEMENT
It is that emotional entanglement in humans, even animals, that distinguishes natural Intelligence from Artificial intelligence. The AI is operated in a military style by 37,200,000,000,000 (37.2 Trillion) living, thriving cells guided by 86,000,000,000 (eighty-six billion) well-organized neurons. The AI’s cells are inert and emotionally neutral semiconductor devices, while AI uses perhaps a trillion or more inert and emotionally neutral semiconductor devices – billions of transistors. Hence, AI lacks the emotional stew stirred in hormones as it happens in humans and animals. It doesn’t crave, it doesn’t dream, and it doesn’t fear defeat. When Deep Blue lost to Kasparov, it didn’t sulk. When it won a year later, it didn’t celebrate. Its programmers did. Kasparov exulted when he won, but, as a human characteristic, refused to accept defeat when he lost, offering excuses for his loss.
Your Alexa might thank you. Siri may tell a joke. ChatGPT could say it’s “thrilled” by your compliment.” But none of them feels a thing; they just repeat a ‘pattern’ that they had been taught. Even the GPS voice guiding you dozens of miles through a maze of traffic blocks and red lights, bearing up with bad drivers ahead and those in cross-traffic, but the stoic female voice doesn’t curse at those who hinder a smooth drive. In fact, as Google Genie admitted to me, AI devices do not know that they exit, let alone desiring to rule over mankind.
PROPHECIES OF DOOM
So when former President Obama expressed concern about the emergence of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), he likely assumed it was closer than it is. In reality, AGI—a system capable of human-like understanding and self-awareness—is an oxymoron that may never come true. Some dream of sentient machines emerging from exotic compounds yet to be discovered, but that remains the stuff of science fiction, not science..
That said, the risks of AI misuse are real. Geoffrey Hinton’s warning about a “digital intelligence” amassing knowledge data far beyond human reach is somewhat valid. Not because the machine becomes evil, but because an evil mind might wield it. This risk exists even with a laptop or a mobile phone. From phishing scams to deepfakes and fake videos, we’ve already seen how AI, why, even Photoshop and Acrobat Pro on your laptop, can be turned into a weapon. The real danger isn’t AI. It’s the aspiring despot, a megalomaniac Kim Jong-un, a self-obsessed Donald Trump, or a religious fanatic in the mold of Osama Bin Laden who seeks a quick ascension to heaven.
WHAT IF SOMEONE SYNTHESIZES NEURONS AND TRANSISTORS
And perhaps that’s the area where young Mary Shelley was most prescient. Her monster was built with human body parts. Today’s Frankenstein might not stitch together parts of human corpses to create a digital monster, but there are fears that someone could link a live neural system to GPUs and proceed to conquer the world. Fortunately, the probability of a functional machine-GPU-human-CNS combination is unlikely in any foreseeable future. Even if it ha[pens, nature’s largely inscrutable technology will block an attempt to plant the chemicals that create emotions – the very substances that helps you feel your emotions and emotional functions that can create self awareness.
Conclusion : The danger is imaginary.
AI is meant to be a mind tool. Much like the proverbial pen, which is mightier than the sword, it can prove more powerful than any material weapon. Yet, as a screwdriver can be misused as a knife, profit-seeking fly-by-night operators may exploit AI to harm or defame others—creating fake images, doctored videos, or realistic but false narratives to malign public figures. These dangers are not new; every technology has been misused in its time. What is new is scale and speed. However, there is no evidence that AI, or even future forms such as Artificial General Intelligence or “Super AI,” could evolve into an enemy of humanity with self-driven vengeance or ambitions of control.
AI remains a tool—its impact depends on the hands that wield it.
