This is an opinion from the Center.
We live in the age of artificial intelligence. Long before it emerged from laboratories and server rooms, the idea of AI took root in the imagination. I grew up with it planted firmly in my mind through science-fiction cinema and video games. Films such as Alien and i,Robot were instrumental in revealing both the promise of AI and the peril of what our future might yet become.
Only recently did I read Frank Herbert’s Dune. There, one finds humanity spread across the stars in astonishing numbers. The scale of human reach and technological mastery is unmistakable, yet artificial intelligence is conspicuously absent. This omission is no accident. In Herbert’s universe, humanity once waged a catastrophic war against thinking machines, a war that nearly brought our species to extinction. Other stories echo this warning. The Terminator portrays AI not merely as a tool, but as a superintelligence, relentless and intrinsically bent on humanity’s destruction at every level of existence.
The media doesn’t seem to know what to do with the rapid expanse of AI—whether to celebrate it or to forecast its doom. Seen here, on Fox Business, the CEO of NVIDIA says the artificial intelligence boom is just getting started: “AI is going to be everywhere.” Meanwhile, The New York Times has begun voicing its own uncertainty, touting its confusion over the AI boom in a recent opinion article.
The AI of our present age may be likened, for now, to a powerful human mind. It calculates with speed, digests vast legal and technical texts, and answers questions with startling fluency. Yet it has not crossed the threshold into superintelligence. That threshold, once crossed, marks a profound change. Superintelligence is not merely intelligence amplified; it is intelligence transformed—something no longer tethered to human limits, human sympathy, or human restraint. What little humanity it might inherit is soon discarded in pursuit of power and efficiency alone.
In the twentieth century, men such as Albert Einstein and J. Robert Oppenheimer feared the creation of the atomic bomb—not merely for its destructive force, but for the possibility that it might ignite the very atmosphere of the Earth. Since that moment, humanity has lived under the shadow of nuclear annihilation. Those men spent their later years haunted by the consequences of their own brilliance. In our own age, we have figures such as Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Altman—men at the helm of technologies whose consequences they themselves may not fully grasp—guiding us forward, perhaps unwittingly, toward a different kind of reckoning.
Frank Herbert warned us plainly in Dune:
“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”
One could argue that this enslavement has already begun. Social media was the threshold. It reshaped our relationships, distorted our perception of reality, and quietly influenced our choices. AI now carries this power to an unfathomable scale. We already see humanity surrendering its desires, its creativity, and even its spirituality to machines that neither know us nor care for us.
If the internet is the body, then social media is the cancer—and artificial intelligence has made the disease terminal.
And yet, AI is here. It is not going away. Like the internet and social media before it, it holds immense capacity for connection, opportunity, and growth. It may elevate humanity in ways we cannot fully imagine. But history, our sternest teacher, offers a warning: we and our adversaries alike have rarely chosen the path of restraint. Time and again, we have chosen the path of power over the path of wisdom, the path of domination over the path of love.
Christian Mangum is a soldier in the US Army National Guard. He has a Center bias.
This piece was reviewed and edited by News Analyst and Social Media Editor Malayna J. Bizier (Right), and News Editor Emily Allen (Left).
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