Everyone is asking whether artificial intelligence will destroy us. I think we’re asking the wrong question. Long before the first chatbot, we were already on the road to self-destruction. AI didn’t put us on that road. It just handed us a faster vehicle.
I was a boy in 1952. In my lifetime, I have watched the world swear “never again” after two world wars, then build enough nuclear weapons to end civilization many times over. Genocide, terrorism, and endless wars followed. A shooting at a school was almost unheard of when I was young. Today they happen so often that many barely make the news. Organized crime has gone global, trafficking drugs, weapons, and human beings across every border, and ethnic and religious hatred still tears communities and whole nations apart.
Some will say there was violence back then too, and they’re right. Colonial wars ravaged Africa, and in 1961 police in Paris massacred Algerian protesters. But that is exactly the point: we never healed. We keep repeating the same wounds. Today Sudan’s war has created the world’s worst displacement crisis, and Indigenous women go missing and are murdered while too many look away.
The same sickness shows in how we treat one another and the Earth. The richest 1% now own more than most of humanity combined, while hundreds of millions go to bed hungry. The progress we did make is slipping: this year the UN warned that the war on Iran would push more than 30 million people back into poverty.
In my lifetime, the carbon in our atmosphere has climbed from about 310 parts per million to over 420, and since 1970 the world’s wildlife populations have fallen by roughly 70%. Floods, fires, and droughts grow worse each year, and a pandemic showed how fragile and unequal we really are. We have the means to feed everyone and care for and restore creation. We simply lack the will. We are more connected than ever, and more divided than ever.
None of this was caused by AI. It was caused by greed, short-term thinking, and a culture that measures worth by profit instead of by love, justice, and care for one another.
Now we have built machines in our own image, trained on our words, our habits, and our priorities. So of course AI reflects us. Used to chase profit, it extracts more water, more energy, and more resources at an ever faster pace. Used to manipulate, it manipulates. Used to divide, it divides. It is a mirror, and many of us don’t like what we see.
But a mirror is also a gift, if we dare to look into it. The real question isn’t “How do we control AI?” It’s “How do we heal ourselves?” And here is the hope: the same power that speeds up our destruction could speed up our healing. World Peace has always seemed almost impossible, yet if we make a collective choice to put our full moral and spiritual force behind building a new planetary civilization, we can get there faster than we ever imagined. We can accelerate towards peace just as fast as we are accelerating towards destruction.
Or we can keep suffering until we finally wake up, and hope it is not too late for many of us humans, including possibly ourselves, our families, and many more of our animal relatives on our Mother Earth. Mother Earth will go on, no matter what. The real question is how well we will survive on her.
AI is not sick. We are sick. The cure will never come from a machine. It has to come from a change of heart. So before we ask what AI will do to us, let’s ask what we will choose to become. AI will follow.
Hereditary Chief Phil Lane Jr.
Chickasaw and Ihanktonwan Nations, White Swan Oyate
Four Worlds International Institute
Union of the Condor, Hummingbird, and Eagle
Compassion Games International