AI: The Distance from Good Tool to False God (Part 1)

In December 2025, TIME magazine announced its Person of the Year: "The Architects of AI." On the cover stood Jensen Huang, Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Lisa Su, and others—the tech leaders who designed, built, and propelled the AI revolution. TIME editor-in-chief Sam Jacobs explained the choice this way: "2025 was the year when artificial intelligence's full potential roared into view, and when it became clear that there will be no turning back or opting out."

This wasn't the first time TIME bestowed its Person of the Year title on a non-individual entity. In 1982, it was the personal computer. In 1988, it was "The Endangered Earth." But this time, the magazine deliberately chose people rather than the technology itself—the individuals who imagined, designed, and built AI. This choice itself tells us something: AI is no longer merely a technology. It is a civilizational shift driven by specific human beings.

And what are these people saying?

A New Salvation Narrative

At the 2018 Davos Forum, Google CEO Sundar Pichai declared that AI is "the most important thing humanity has ever worked on," "more profound than fire or electricity." In 2023, he reiterated this comparison on CBS's 60 Minutes. Notice his phrasing: not "very useful," not "will significantly boost efficiency," but "more important than fire." Fire—the thing that lifted humanity out of darkness and cold.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote in his essay that the AI revolution "will generate tremendous wealth" and that the cost of labor "will fall toward zero." He positioned AI as the fourth great technological revolution in human history, following agriculture, industry, and computers. In his vision, AI will grant everyone access to top-tier education and healthcare, prices will plummet dramatically, and humanity will enter an era of unprecedented abundance.

On the political front, AI has become more than a tech issue—it is a symbol of national power. On his second day in office in 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump announced the "Stargate Project," a $500 billion AI infrastructure investment that he called "the largest AI infrastructure project in history" and "a resounding declaration of America's potential." That same week, he signed an executive order titled "Removing Barriers to American AI Leadership," explicitly aiming to maintain U.S. "dominance" in the AI field. AI is no longer just Silicon Valley's business. It has become national strategy, great power competition, the front line of geopolitical rivalry.

We hear these kinds of claims constantly: AI will bring liberation. AI will eliminate inequality. AI will usher in a new era. This doesn't sound like a product pitch. It sounds like the proclamation of a faith. When everyone speaks the same language, faces the same direction, and builds the same tower reaching toward heaven, it's hard not to think of Babel.

But AI is not that tower. Technology, as an extension of human reason and creativity, can genuinely benefit humanity. The real Tower of Babel is the desire within the human heart—the desire to build, by our own power, a world that will satisfy us. Once this desire becomes the driving force of an entire era, any tool, no matter how good, will be swept along in that direction.

I don't doubt that some of these leaders genuinely harbor pure intentions in advancing this new revolution. But there is a more fundamental problem: when an industry inflates to a scale measured in trillions of dollars, when shareholder interests, geopolitical maneuvering, and the momentum of capital all rush in, any individual's goodwill can hardly withstand this torrent. More than half a century ago, Jacques Ellul warned in The Technological Society: once technology forms a system, it no longer serves human purposes but operates according to its own logic. You think you are using it; in fact, it is shaping you.

So we must ask honestly: Is this revolution truly about liberating humanity, or is it another game of power? Is it driven by love for humanity, or by the fear of being left behind?

An Unequal Feast

Those who defend AI usually invoke history. They say: Look, every technological revolution has brought progress. The printing press freed knowledge from the monopoly of certain classes. The steam engine liberated people from the fields. The internet allowed villagers in remote mountains to access global information. The data doesn't lie—human life expectancy has increased, literacy rates have risen, extreme poverty has declined.

These are all facts. The progress brought by technology is real, and we need not deny it.

But these facts obscure another set of facts.

Every technological revolution, while producing "progress" in macro-level data, has simultaneously manufactured new forms of inequality. The internet did democratize information, but it also created the entirely new mode of exploitation that Shoshana Zuboff exposed in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. Zuboff used a disturbing analogy: it's like poachers slaughtering elephants for their ivory. In this economic model, our behavioral data is extracted and processed into prediction products, then traded in behavioral futures markets. We are not the customers. We are not even the product itself. We are what's left behind after the extraction.

Meanwhile, Harvard's "Study of Adult Development," which has continued for over eighty years, has repeatedly confirmed one thing: the most essential factor in human happiness is not wealth, efficiency, or technology, but deep interpersonal relationships. The material improvements brought by technological progress are real, but they have never answered the deepest longing of the human heart: to be seen, to be known, to be loved.

The familiar 80/20 rule (twenty percent of people own eighty percent of resources) will likely evolve into a 1/99 pattern in the AI era. Of course, we occasionally see inspiring stories: some grassroots entrepreneur makes it big using AI. But behind every such story, how many people are drowning in the technological flood? We will never hear their voices, because no one reports on the failures.

Technological revolution is more like a flood. Some people build boats in the flood and climb aboard. Others drown in that same flood. And those who build the boats are often the same people who control the floodgates.

If this is how the narrative and benefit structure of the AI era works, then the next question becomes: Is AI really just a "neutral tool"?

Further Reading

📖 Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (1964). The original text for understanding the argument that "technology no longer serves human purposes but operates according to its own logic."

📖 Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019). Harvard Business School professor Zuboff exposes the true logic of the digital economy: your behavioral data is extracted, processed into prediction products, and traded in behavioral futures markets. Over 700 pages, but the first three chapters alone are enough to overturn your understanding of "free services."

📖 Robert Waldinger & Marc Schulz, The Good Life (2023). The Harvard "Study of Adult Development" mentioned in this article—this book is the most complete popular account of that research.

🎬 Robert Waldinger, TED Talk: "What Makes a Good Life?" (2015, over 40 million views) https://www.ted.com/talks/robert_waldinger_what_makes_a_good_life_lessons_from_the_longest_study_on_happiness