Will We Control AI, or Will AI Control Us?

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Dr. Salman Ghouri is an oil and gas industry advisor with expertise in long-term forecasting, macroeconomic analysis and market assessments.

The world is undergoing a transformation driven by the exponential growth of artificial intelligence (AI), a pace of change unprecedented in human history. Consequently, many people fear massive unemployment, along with other implications that could affect their livelihoods and quality of life. Is this truly the case? Yes, or perhaps not entirely.

The purpose of this short article is to explore the potential benefits of AI and its implications for human society. It is still too early to fully assess the potential benefits of AI, but they could be enormous.

History shows that technological inventions have continuously improved economic productivity, efficiency, and quality of life. Many inventions that were once considered luxuries eventually became essential parts of everyday life. Electricity, automobiles, airplanes, refrigerators, washing machines, medical technologies, farming equipment, and countless household devices have all contributed to greater comfort, efficiency, and convenience.

Consider the invention of the typewriter in the 18th century, which transformed business communication. In the 1960s, pocket-sized electronic calculators emerged, followed by computers and laptops. When we were graduate students in the late 1970s, our professors, many of whom had been trained in the United States, would proudly demonstrate regression results generated by computers in seconds, replacing hours of manual calculations.

Did these innovations create mass unemployment? Or did they enhance human productivity and quality of life?

The answer appears clear: they improved our lives. While some occupations disappeared or declined, workers generally moved into other sectors and new occupations emerged.

Modern inventions such as smartphones, the internet, and applications such as WhatsApp and Facebook have made communication instantaneous and inexpensive. They have even reduced the need for travel, allowing people to see and speak with loved ones almost whenever they wish.

Every time humanity experienced a major technological breakthrough, people often believed that we had reached the peak of progress. Yet progress continued, and it will likely continue for generations.

AI itself is not new. Its foundations were established in the 1940s and 1950s, with significant advances occurring in later decades. However, investment and development accelerated dramatically in the 2020s, driven by advances in computing, transformer architectures, and large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT.

These systems demonstrate capabilities that increasingly resemble aspects of human intelligence, including language understanding, reasoning, pattern recognition, information synthesis, and, in some cases, creativity. As a result, AI is rapidly becoming integrated into countless sectors of society.

This exponential growth has generated both excitement and concern.

Many fear that AI could lead to mass unemployment, reducing consumer spending and potentially slowing economic growth. Yet history suggests that technological innovation does not necessarily destroy employment permanently. Agricultural innovations increased productivity while shifting labor into other sectors. Industrial automation eliminated some occupations while creating others. Medical advances increased life expectancy and improved human productivity.

The important question is whether AI will follow the same historical pattern, or whether it represents something fundamentally different.

Some argue that AI is fundamentally different from previous inventions and could cause widespread unemployment. We cannot realistically stop the development of AI, nor should we necessarily try to. However, policymakers, economists, philosophers, educators, and academics must urgently consider how society should manage its economic, social, psychological, and cultural consequences.

AI is already performing tasks once handled by receptionists, telephone operators, analysts, writers, programmers, and many other professionals. Autonomous vehicles, drone delivery, robotic automation, and AI-assisted decision-making are advancing rapidly.

The potential impact could be far greater than anything we have experienced before.

Consider something as simple as ChatGPT. Ask a question and, within seconds, you can receive an enormous amount of organized information. If you want to improve your writing, you can copy and paste your text and ask AI to edit it. You can ask it to prepare a birthday message, a condolence message, a business letter, or almost anything else you can imagine. In seconds, you may receive several formal or informal versions of your original thoughts.

More sophisticated AI models are being developed for energy forecasting, refinery optimization, environmental analysis, medicine, agriculture, manufacturing, finance, and virtually every other segment of society.

Imagine, for example, a strategic planning department in an oil and gas company. Today, a team of senior professionals may spend months developing forecasting models, key performance indicators (KPIs), business plans, and refinery optimization strategies. In the future, sophisticated AI systems may perform much of this work, perhaps requiring only one or two professionals to supervise, interpret, and implement the results.

If AI can provide highly personalized instruction, explain complex subjects, generate study material, evaluate assignments, and assist students individually, will we still need traditional classrooms and large numbers of instructors in their current form?

And the same question can be asked across almost every sector.

This is where the unemployment concern becomes much more serious. In previous technological revolutions, displaced workers could generally move into other sectors that were less automated. But what happens if AI simultaneously transforms most sectors of the economy?

Will there be enough new occupations to absorb displaced workers?

Therefore, policymakers must begin thinking beyond traditional economic solutions. If AI significantly reduces the need for human labor, society may need entirely new approaches to income distribution, education, employment, taxation, and social protection.

We may need to think outside the traditional economic framework.

My assessment is that AI is fundamentally different from many previous inventions.

In the past, we delegated physical labor and deterministic calculations to machines, but we generally did not delegate cognition itself. There were an input and an expected output, and humans understood and controlled the process.

We are entering an age in which machines can increasingly analyze information, generate ideas, recognize patterns, write, communicate, make recommendations, and perform tasks that once required human judgment.

For the first time, humanity may be developing an entity that could eventually become more capable than humans in an increasing number of intellectual domains.

In fact, many of the technological innovations we have adopted in recent years have already incorporated elements of AI, often without us consciously recognizing that we are interacting with intelligent systems.

Consider the devices in our homes. We may ask a voice assistant to play with the white noise or set a cooking timer or ask Siri to do certain tasks. Smart lighting systems automatically turn lights on and off. Irrigation systems can skip watering when rain is detected. Thermostats learn our habits and schedules and automatically adjust heating and cooling to maintain our preferred level of comfort.

Even our entertainment systems increasingly anticipate what we might want to watch.

Have you ever discussed something at home and then opened your phone or YouTube and noticed remarkably similar recommendations?

I recently watched a television segment in which an artist was painting on the street while other playing music. People from a technology company approached the artist and asked how much he earned each day. They reportedly earn approximately $200 daily.

They offered them $500 a day if they would wear special gloves while continuing to paint and play music.

The gloves captured their hand movements and transmitted the data to a computer system. After collecting this information over time, the system could begin learning the relationship between the artist’s movements and the resulting artwork.

Eventually, AI could potentially reproduce similar movements and generate similar images and play similar music.

This is a simple illustration of a much more complicated process.