IS AI really going to dehumanize civilization? I think the opposite is also plausible, considering the nuanced possibilities of the historical dialectic in human social and intellectual progress.
Language sits at the heart of the AI question. For the first time in history, an invention has intruded into humans’ privileged space of causality and expression, pricking their sense of exceptionalism. Artificial intelligence, through large language models, is now using the same instrument for attaining analytical perfection through which humans have long imagined and reasoned this world. For millennia, language has been a central repository of consciousness and civilization. Humans have used this tool to organize, preserve and transmit knowledge.
Despite its centrality, however, there exists a trace of betrayal and stagnancy when we translate a psychologically sophisticated moment into language. It becomes a prison for the ingenuity of human experience. Further, the oppression of terminologies around race, religion, nationhood and ideology has shaped linguistic barbarism that has contributed to divisions and wars.
Just as humans once outsourced physical labor to machines, now AI gives them a chance to see language from a distance, free from the possessive anxiety around definitions and to analyze the ordinariness of its excellence by outsourcing much of their linguistic and empirical pretensions to AI. Paradoxically, liberation from the performance of language may push humanity toward more innovative, instinctual and distinctly human ways of processing ideas, measuring excellence, building teams and beautifying culture on personal and systemic levels. As machines rapidly master analytical and linguistic precision, the communicative order of the human condition may be distinguished by the attraction of origins, by the power of human synchronicity and emotional intelligence, by the mystery of imperfection, and by the tang of originality in tears and cheers.
The general historical pattern of humanity’s response to major epistemic or technological leaps largely follows a familiar trajectory: excitement and suspicion, general anxiety, adjustment and, finally, inevitability.
Socrates, as Plato mentions in Phaedrus, worried that writing would produce forgetfulness. The pattern was similar centuries later with the printing press, when knowledge was democratized and the monopoly over its interpretation was destroyed. Texts became widely available beyond monasteries and elites of the royal and judicial courts. Ordinary people started decoding sacred texts and competing interpretations collided. The new access to texts brought excitement, but also anxiety and resistance. European religious authorities sought to control the circulation of ideas through instruments like the Roman Index of Prohibited Books (1559). In the Ottoman Muslim world, the delayed adoption of printing was associated with a slower diffusion of scientific and modern intellectual currents.
Gradually, however, disruption gave way to adjustment and anxiety to assimilation. The remarkable plurality of contradictions among the intellectual movements that shaped the modern man could hardly have flourished on the same scale without the prior democratization of knowledge.
The Scientific Revolution overturned Aristotelian cosmology and challenged his hylomorphic understanding of nature. Rationalism privileged reason; Empiricism answered with experience. The Enlightenment questioned authority, placed individual freedom at the heart of the social contract and sowed the seeds of modern constitutionalism. Idealism redefined mind, consciousness and reality. Materialism interpreted historical evolution through class conflict. Existentialism and later philosophical currents put traditional certainties of morality and metaphysics in the dock. The printing press not only got assimilated but reframed the psychological and intellectual architecture of human existence.
The same sequence of responses appeared with the Industrial and Digital Revolutions. Carlyle’s Signs of the Times (1829) warned of an “Age of Machinery” and its impact on human individuality and social order. Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 expounded on the alienation of labour under industrial capitalism. T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) portrayed the spiritual emptiness of modern industrial existence.
Some of these concerns might be genuine; others may reflect the natural apprehension before an uncertain future. But one thing is certain: the human condition has proved outstandingly adaptive and resilient. Today, both machines and the internet have become inseparable partners in the social, academic and commercial landscape of mankind in every corner of the globe.
AI has shown tremendous performance in moving through these stages, particularly in the speed and scale of its transformatory impact. First, excitement: a new global geometry of strategic alliances is evolving around supply chains of artificial intelligence instead of ideologies. The U.S.-driven Pax Silica is bringing together partners around AI infrastructure and supply chains, while China initiated the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization (WAICO) to offer a counter-framework for AI cooperation.
Global financial markets are showing speculative optimism. SpaceX, incorporating xAI, initially raised a record $75 billion in its June 2026 IPO at a valuation of approximately $1.77 trillion. Investors valued it at roughly 95 times its previous year’s sales. Such enthusiasm echoes the American stock-market boom of the 1920s and the dot-com boom at the turn of the twenty-first century. AI is present in modern smartphones and integrated across business, art, writing, warfare, government and industry.
Anxiety and suspicion are moving in parallel. In the past few years, many publications, seminars and podcasts have warned of AI-driven unemployment and the possibility that autonomous systems may undermine human agency. Nevertheless, the stage of inevitability may not be far away. In Heidegger’s sense, AI is moving fast toward “readiness-to-hand,” becoming embedded in human processes with relational familiarity.
Some concerns make sense, including the environmental impact of the enormous energy and water use of large data centers. AI also poses challenges to human privacy and may amplify fabricated content, propaganda, cyberattacks and risks of autonomous warfare. Another concern is the accumulation of power and its manifestations across politics and society. McKinsey estimates that data centers will require nearly $7 trillion in global investment by 2030. This overconcentration of capital can leave other existentially important areas neglected. Millions across poorer and war-torn regions still struggle for food, shelter and basic healthcare. Furthermore, investors may face losses as the market enters a period of consolidation.
Nevertheless, history suggests that human faculty is not incapable of developing institutions to regulate profound technological and epistemic shifts. In my view, dehumanization is profoundly linked with decadence in the moral, legal and aesthetic structures of a society. It is the human being, not any human creation or discovery, who carries within itself the capacity for cultural progress as well as self-destruction. Technology can determine the speed of progress or decline, but it is not, by itself, the cause of either. Every transformative technology requires responsible regulation to direct its use toward human welfare. But the general anxiety about AI becoming a terminator of humanness is overrated. It conflates AI’s analytical and executional power with the moral, emotional and metaphysical complexity of the human cognitive apparatus.
—The author is a regular columnist and commentator on global affairs, serving on the panels of the UNFCCC and ICAN. He taught Public Policy in the National Defence University of Pakistan.
