Should We Fear the Rise of AI?
Written by Guy Van de Putte, Spiritual Guide & Mentor
Guy Van de Putte works as a guide for those looking for help navigating life's challenges or finding themselves at a crossroads. Blending shamanism, breathwork, and constellation therapy with the non-dual and yogic traditions, he has a wide toolkit to support the power of presence and the healing words to accommodate lasting change.
In recent conversations with clients and friends, I have noticed how often artificial intelligence (AI) brings up uncertainty about the future. Early concerns focused mainly on AI going rogue and taking over the world. Today, people wonder whether their jobs will still exist, whether their children will lose the ability to think for themselves, and where this technology might eventually lead us. Beneath these questions, I often hear something deeper: fear of a future we cannot predict or control.
AI is everywhere these days. There seems to be no escaping it. In a very short time, it has become almost indispensable, and its applications keep expanding like an unstoppable avalanche. Hardly any app or website exists that hasn’t incorporated this new technology. AI chatbots increasingly handle work once done by customer service employees, while teachers struggle to determine whether their students wrote those remarkable essays themselves.
Claiming that AI has rapidly entered almost every aspect of our lives would hardly be an exaggeration. Developments that once took decades, or even centuries, now seem to happen within years. The pace of technological change keeps accelerating.
In the midst of it all, we try to keep up while occasionally looking back on what seemed like a simpler time.
Change may be the only constant, but that doesn’t mean we welcome it. The human mind naturally resists the unknown. It fills the empty spaces with worries about the future, often fed by science fiction books and movies whose grim predictions suddenly appear a lot less fictional than before.
But what if AI is not only changing how we live and work, but also revealing how we respond to uncertainty?
AI is here to stay. Perhaps it’s time to examine those fears, look at what history can teach us, and explore how we might work with it without losing ourselves in the stories our minds create about it.
Will AI take over our jobs?
Yes, and no. Throughout history, major technological advances have transformed the way we work. During the Industrial Revolution, many people left the countryside and moved to cities to work in factories. With the arrival of the digital age, much of our work shifted again, from physical labor toward computers, information, and knowledge.
Professions such as lamplighters and coachmen disappeared, while entirely new industries emerged around technologies previous generations could never have imagined.
That does not mean every transition was easy or fair. People lost their livelihoods. Communities were disrupted. New opportunities did not always appear in the same place, at the same time, or for the same people whose work had disappeared.
The arrival of AI may be no different. Schools, companies, governments, and workers will all need time to adapt. We cannot yet know what this new reality will look like.
Consider music producers. Many of those who created innovative sounds embraced synthesizers, samplers, and computers, exploring possibilities that had not existed before. Today, they are beginning to do the same with AI.
Across many professions, therefore, the question may not only be, “Will AI replace my job?” but also, “How could it change what I can create?”
That possibility shouldn’t blind us to the genuine risks. Some people will be affected more than others, and there is no guarantee that the opportunities created by AI will automatically compensate for everything it takes away.
History cannot tell us exactly what will happen this time. It can only remind us that change does not always lead where our fears predict or where our hopes promise.
Is AI safe?
Let me answer that question with another: Is electricity safe? It can injure or kill people and cause fires that burn down houses. Yet it also lights our homes, preserves our food, and powers our hospitals. We don’t consider electricity either good or bad. We recognize both its value and its dangers and try to use it responsibly. AI is far more complex, and many of its risks are still unknown. But perhaps approaching it as either our salvation or our destruction is equally limiting.
AI’s developers, owners, training data, safeguards, and commercial interests all influence how it behaves and how it may be used. I am not an AI expert, so I will leave questions about machines escaping human control to those with the knowledge required to assess that possibility. But it would be too easy to gather all responsibility into a box, wrap it with a ribbon, and send it to the people building the technology.
Those of us using it also have a role to play. We can use AI to deceive and harm, or to express our creativity, solve problems, and create something meaningful that contributes to life on Earth. Who might benefit from what we create, and who might get hurt? What matters is not only what AI can do, but also the level of awareness we bring when engaging with it.
Regulation will matter. So will education, accountability, and transparency. But rules alone cannot determine how wisely we use what we have created, especially since technological possibilities are expanding faster than our legal and political systems can keep up with.
What are we really afraid of?
These concerns should not be dismissed. Jobs may be lost, technology can be misused, and people may become overly dependent on systems few of us fully understand.
This is not about convincing ourselves that AI is safe or that everything will work out. It is about recognizing which concerns require a conscious response and which fears are stories about a future no one can predict.
Fear rarely limits itself to what is happening now. It takes a genuine concern and carries it into an imagined future. Before long, we are no longer responding to what is in front of us. We are responding to everything our minds tell us might happen.
This is not unique to AI. We do the same thing when facing illness, a change in our relationships, or any situation we cannot control. When information is missing, the mind often fills the gaps with our deepest fears.
The question is therefore not only whether AI is dangerous. It is also whether living in fear will make us any safer.
Fear can alert us to a risk and inspire us to act. But when it takes control, it narrows our vision. It can make us resist change, reject possibilities before exploring them, or surrender our responsibility to those who promise certainty.
Perhaps the invitation is not to rise above our fears or pretend they aren’t there, but to turn toward them. Which part of the fear is asking for a practical response? Which part comes from an old need to know and control what has never been ours to control?
Could AI change human consciousness?
In this context, a rise in consciousness does not mean transcending our humanity or eliminating fear. It means becoming aware of what is shaping our choices, so we can respond rather than merely react.
Beyond the fears it brings to the surface, perhaps AI’s greatest impact will be the deeper questions it asks us to face.
If a machine can write, draw, compose music, analyze data, and reproduce much of what we once considered uniquely human, we may be forced to reconsider what makes us unique.
What does it actually mean to be human? Is our value determined by how much we produce, by how quickly we can process information, or by how much knowledge we can collect and repeat? Or is there something within us that productivity or intelligence alone cannot measure?
AI may challenge us to distinguish intelligence from wisdom, information from understanding, and imitation from genuine experience. It may require us to become more discerning about what is real, what is valuable, and what is worthy of our attention.
It may also reveal how easily we give away our own authority. If we accept every answer generated for us without questioning it, the problem may not be that AI has learned to think. It may be that we have stopped thinking for ourselves.
AI will not create a shift in consciousness for us. No technology can take responsibility for the way we choose to live. It can just as easily amplify whatever remains unconscious within us.
But it can also become a mirror, reflecting not only our extraordinary creative potential, but also the level of awareness with which we use it.
Our power to create has never been greater. That means the way we move forward, individually and collectively, has never mattered more.
Perhaps AI will not bring about the rise in human consciousness we have been waiting for. Perhaps it will show us why that rise can no longer wait.
Read more from Guy Van de Putte
Guy Van de Putte, Spiritual Guide & Mentor
Guy Van de Putte works as a guide for all those looking for help navigating life's challenges or finding themselves at a crossroads. His passion is helping people who are ready to wake up and go beyond the stories and patterns that unconsciously run their lives. Thereby helping them to debunk the lies they told themselves that are at the root of all the drama in their life, and take back the power over their own lives. So the old wounds from the past can be permanently healed, and a new life of true freedom can emerge from that. A fulfilled life in service of and in harmony with their true calling.
