The Amplifier and the Mirror: Why AI Won’t Save Us
…..and How We Can Save Ourselves Based on conversations with economists and AI specialists, this essay looks at what AI can really do for society – and where I see its limits. I’ve come to believe that our future depends far more on human integrity, education, and our collective will than on any machine. Keyword: Responsible AI. I share what I’ve observed, what a careful analysis reveals, and where I stand. But of course, I’d love to hear your perspective. Beyond the Hype – A Sober Look at the AI Revolution Let’s be honest: artificial intelligence has become the new religion of progress.We are told it will cure cancer, reverse climate change, run our companies, and maybe even fix our marriages if we ask politely enough. Every conference stage, TED Talk, and LinkedIn post seems to promise salvation through algorithms. And yet, beneath all this digital euphoria runs a deep unease.Will AI take our jobs? Entrench inequality? Decide who gets healthcare or a mortgage?Or worse: is there a risk, that it will quietly make us irrelevant? After years of observing this debate – from the front row of academia and the trenches of corporate decision-making (although this was before AI became so widespread and available to everybody) – I’ve come to a simple conclusion: (Click on image to see the full overview) AI is not our saviour. It’s our amplifier and our mirror. It amplifies whatever we feed into it – brilliance or bias, empathy or greed – and reflects our collective systems, values, and flaws back at us with unnerving accuracy. AI has no soul, no conscience, no intrinsic sense of “good.” Nevertheless, I always end my prompts with “Thank You”. What it has is scale. It executes human intent – good or bad – faster, louder, and wider than ever before. So, the question isn’t just what AI will do to us.It’s what we will do with AI.And whether we have the courage, education, and moral clarity to steer it wisely, under the umbrella “responsible AI” – before it steers us. What AI Really Is – and Why That Matters Before we can talk about impact, we need to clear the fog. AI doesn’t “think.” It doesn’t “learn” like a human. It doesn’t “understand” your business, your feelings, or your cat videos. Although many users seem to believe this. There is even a disturbing trend to see AI as religion: ChatGPT Religion: The Disturbing AI Cult. What large language models (like ChatGPT) do is predict the next statistically likely word, based on trillions of examples. It’s a breathtakingly sophisticated guessing machine – I compare it to a parrot with a PhD in probability. That means AI doesn’t create truth; it recombines it. It doesn’t generate wisdom; it synthesizes what’s already out there. And since most of what’s “out there” is written by humans with blind spots, biases, and occasionally questionable judgment, those same biases are baked into every digital prediction. When you ask AI to summarize “the typical professional,” it might over-represent men. When you ask it to “suggest a good leader,” it might prefer youth. When you ask it to “write a diet plan for women,” it might use unrealistic, data-skewed health metrics. AI is biased – as are the texts it has been trained on. Unfortunately, these are not innocent errors, they are reflections of the data we’ve produced as a society. And because AI amplifies patterns, it doesn’t just mirror inequality – it multiplies it. So, when I say AI is a mirror, I mean it quite literally.The question is: do we like what we see? History Repeats – Only Faster If all this sounds familiar, it’s because we’ve been here before. Well, if you are my age, you have seen economic bubbles burst. Every industrial revolution has promised liberation and delivered disruption first. The steam engine freed us from physical labour but trapped millions in factories.The computer promised “the paperless office” and gave us inboxes overflowing with digital busywork. The pattern is always the same: early adopters profit, while ordinary people adjust, often painfully.Yes, society eventually catches up – but only after decades of inequality, policy failure, and public backlash. The Industrial Revolution generated immense wealth but concentrated it in a few hands for nearly a century. Real wages stagnated while profits soared.And now, as AI begins its own revolution, we are watching the same movie again – only in high definition. Here’s the unromantic truth: technology doesn’t automatically create fairness.It creates potential. What happens next depends on governance, education, and human decency. Without deliberate intervention, the “AI revolution” will follow the same pattern – immense wealth for a few, lost livelihoods for many, and a widening gap between those who understand the tools and those who are used by them. There are experts around, who are sure, this will happen rather sooner than later. Therefore, it is even more important, to focus on “responsible AI”: think about consequences, before blindly following a trend. The Productivity Illusion There’s a persistent fantasy that AI will finally make the economy boom – that by automating drudgery, we’ll all have time for creativity, family, or yoga retreats. Lovely idea. Unfortunately, reality isn’t playing along. Decades of data show that massive investments in technology do not automatically lead to higher productivity. Economists call it the “productivity paradox”: we see the gadgets everywhere – but not in the GDP. Why? Because plugging in new technology doesn’t automatically fix broken systems.Real productivity comes from humans – educated, healthy, motivated humans – who know how to integrate new tools into meaningful work. When companies adopt AI, they often see an initial drop in productivity before any long-term gains appear. Systems must be redesigned, staff retrained, data cleaned up – and all of that takes time and money. Most companies don’t have a strategy or plan in place, yet hope, that AI will fix a lack of clear vision. It doesn’t. The flashy dashboards might impress shareholders, but transformation only works…