Might We Be Better Off If AI Took Power Out of Our Hands?

[This piece ran as an op/ed in newspapers in early June, 2026.]

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I’m not happy with humanity these days. And I’m torn between my lifelong love of humanity, and appreciation of the marvelous things we’ve been able to create, and my great disappointment in how we as a species have been botching things in recent years. When I compare the state of human civilization in the 1990s with state of things today, I feel both disgust and sadness.

(In the 1990s, the end of the Cold War opened the possibility that the world might move beyond the war-system into a more cooperative order. Today, violent conflicts again dominate the world scene.

(In that same period, momentum was beginning to build toward addressing the destabilization of Earth’s climate. Not impressive, but inching our way forward. Now, the United States is turning against the renewable energy needed to meet that challenge, while supporting the fossil fuels that drive it. I never imagined that in 2026 we would have leaders who forbid even the mention of “climate change” and refuse to face what many have called the greatest challenge humankind has ever faced.)

When I first began to ponder whether humankind was going to get its act together in time to avoid self-destruction, what I envisioned was steady progress, which might or might not be fast enough. It didn’t occur to me that instead we would have we would have people like Vladimir Putin, and Donald Trump, and Benjamin Netanyahu making the destructive decisions that drag human civilization backward into all that has been wrong about the human world since the rise of civilization.

So, yes, my heart aches from the loss of a fond and respectful relationship with humankind, so that now I see how terribly short we are falling. So much destructive passion like hate. So much selfishness. So much greed. So much cruelty. And – quite troubling to me, since Truth is such a paramount virtue in my values – so much blindness.

So I’m not pleased with us homo sapiens (wise man?), and I’m not pleased with the feelings I have toward our species. One of those feelings is a bitter “You’ve got it coming,” seeing things in terms of fault, and failure, and what religious traditions called bondage to sin. The kind of anger that comes with blaming.

But I don’t really blame humankind, because I can see that we civilization-creating social animals inadvertently put ourselves in an impossible situation, because by inventing a different way of life we left the natural order and fell into the grip of systemic forces that operated like a tornado of destructiveness on how human civilization would develop. And we were the victims of the unforeseen consequences of our taking a step fundamentally unprecedented in the history of Life on Earth.

We did the best we could in circumstances we would never have chosen but couldn’t avoid. And I can see what history has done to us. People do what they can with who they are in a world where destructiveness has long had great power to wound us in ways that disable us from choosing wisely.

It is because humanity has lately seemed so incapable of steering ourselves toward a viable future that I’ve discovered I’ve got mixed feelings about the widely discussed – and universally deplored — possibility: might Artificial Intelligence (AI) reach the point where it takes control?

We are certainly leaving room for better management.

Of course, I recognize that an AI-dominated world could be a nightmare: What if the AI treated humankind the way humans have treated the animals over whom we have exercised our “sovereignty”?

But I can at least imagine an AI that could so order our world that we do not self-destruct: that would use its control so that nations no longer operate in a system of war that could unleash a nuclear holocaust, and that the world’s economic systems function in harmony with the long-term requirements of Life-on-Earth.

Whether it would improve the order of the world for AI to be in control depends on how it is shaped.

If it has no inner life, and thus no goals of its own, everything depends on whether we humans build it to have the well-being of the world’s sentient beings as its goal.

If it develops to the point where it has experience, and thus preferences, everything depends on whether we build into it the kind of character that can be trusted to wield power well—to serve rather than to exploit.

Would we humans be able to construct an AI whose character led it to operate by the Golden Rule, and not be like the tyrants who have deformed the human story through the ages and in our times?

It seems at least possible that our creations – Artificial Intelligence – have the capacity to improve upon us, who have not impressively risen to meet the challenge. It’s possible that Earth needs the power to be taken out of our hands

But whether this new form of intelligence develops consciousness or not, our getting a good outcome from AI’s gaining in power would depend on us humans doing a better job of creating a good AI than we’ve been able to do thus far of creating a well-ordered civilization.