The aim of all non-military technology, from the wheel to AI, is to make our lives increasingly more comfortable, convenient, easy, healthy, entertaining, and cost effective–and we love it. Imagine your life without computers, mobile phones, visual media devices, cooking appliances, refrigeration, heating and air conditioning, modern transportation, medical technology, et. al. Just imagine living your life before the invention of the wheel, before 3500 BCE when you were unlikely to live past twenty-five and likely died–moaning, groaning, and screaming–from bad teeth.
Technology took its most significant jump in the mid to late 1800s with the advent of electricity that gave us electric lights and transformed industry and technology itself, developments we now take for granted. But where would we be without electricity, the flow of electrons that also power your body and your brain–and Artificial Intelligence, with the exception that AI is millions of times faster than the brain and can outperform the brain in terms of calculations by astronomical margins. At most, the human brain can carefully perform a few calculations per second while AI can perform trillions of operations per second and store and recall information through pattern recognition without limit at near light speed while, at most, the human brain can store a terabyte of information and recall only a small fraction of that information.
I have learned a lot in my life, massive amounts of information through all my experiences but I can recall very little relative to the amount of information stored in my brain. So too, AI draws from a vast and constantly growing body of human knowledge gathered from the internet and training data that accesses books, articles, scientific papers, databases, code, conversations, images, video, and audio and can recall all of it–and fast. Just ask Open AI’s Chatgpt, Google’s Gemini, or Meta’s Llama anything and note how fast they come up with an answer. Or ask Alexa that became an LLM in 2025 and get the response from a sweet lilting voice.
Is it any wonder that AI is taking 15,000 jobs per week and more and more everyday? AI is increasingly replacing jobs focused on routine data processing, customer service, and basic content creation, with significant impacts seen in administration, telemarketing, and entry-level creative roles. By early 2026, AI tools are automating tasks like medical scribing, graphic design, and copywriting, with projections indicating a substantial decline in roles such as bank tellers, clerks, and telemarketers–which leaves manual tasks. No it doesn’t.
Robots, particularly in manufacturing, are replacing workers in routine roles, reducing the employment-to-population ratio by approximately 0.2 percentage points in the U.S. for every additional robot per 1,000 workers. Amazon aims to avoid hiring over 600,000 workers by 2033 by using robots for warehouse tasks, and robots have revolutionized the auto industry by shifting production from manual labor to automated, high-precision assembly lines, significantly increasing output, quality, and safety. They handle repetitive tasks like welding and painting and reducing human exposure to hazards. And robots don’t get tired or sick, need vacations, healthcare, unions, or retirement programs. They don’t come in late, miss work, complain, or ask for more pay. Research indicates that increased robotization will lower wages for routine jobs, contributing to a decline in average local market career value and weakening bargaining power for low-skilled workers which means they may have to accept lower paying menial jobs.
The savings that AI/robotics provide for businesses and large corporations is astronomical and growing. Savings means profit, which is, and has been, the name of the game, especially in America. When wealth is prioritized over well-being, money is not the root of all evil. Money is the evil.
We’ve come full circle: We created technology to make our lives comfortable, convenient, easy, healthy, entertaining, and cost effective but the “our” in the equation is slipping away. In the not too distant future, there will be no “us” and therefore no need for our desires, wants, and needs. We are technologizing ourselves out of existence, or at the very least we are technologizing ourselves into serving our AI masters, a euphemism for slaves.
Some people quip, "Well just unplug it" without ever realizing that we are the plug.
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