By admin 
Artificial intelligence can be a valuable tool. AI can help us solve old problems, but it can also create new ones. AI could be used for malicious purposes, or it could be used to usher in a new era of prosperity and enlightenment.
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Contemporary discussions of AI often misunderstand the ambivalence and complexity of technology. Defenders of AI understate its dangers, while overstating its promise. AI’s critics exaggerate its perils, while ignoring its promise.
Consider Wynd Kaufmyn, a Berkeley activist who recently went to jail for blocking the door of OpenAI’s headquarters in San Francisco. Before reporting to jail, Kaufmyn told The San Francisco Standard that “Tech billionaires are taking over and creating a dystopian fascist surveillance police state.”
On the other hand, Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, has described his hopeful vision of a future in which “machines of loving grace” usher in a new era of enlightenment. Amodei imagines smart machines helping humanity make progress in science and medicine, and in pursuit of “enlightenment values.”
The contrast here is stark: AI-fascism or AI-enlightenment. Most likely, things won’t end up in either extreme. AI will help us in some ways, but hurt us in others. AI could be used to enhance democracy, or it could be used to destroy it. This depends on how we develop, regulate and utilize AI.
The history of technology reveals that most technologies are ambivalent. The printing press, the steam engine and the internet changed things in radical ways. Some of the change was good; some was bad. The tool is only part of the story. The larger story is about the social and political systems in which these tools were created and deployed.
Fascism was facilitated by modern technologies, which mechanized propaganda, helped fascists consolidate power and made genocide a grim reality. But modern technology was also employed in the war against fascism. The mechanical devices — trains, tanks, bombs and guns — that were employed to slaughter and dominate people were also used to liberate them.
A longstanding dispute in the philosophy of technology wonders whether tools are neutral or value-laden. The “neutrality thesis” holds that tools have no inherent value and that the value of a tool depends on what it is used for. This idea is echoed in the cliché that “guns don’t kill people, people do.”
Another theory holds that technologies are embedded within structures of value and are value-laden. A typical example is the atomic bomb, created in order to kill on a massive scale. Unlike a hammer or the printing press, it is difficult to imagine atomic bombs as neutral in value.
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With regard to AI, we should consider how this technology is linked to broader economic, social and political structures.
When critics like Kaufmyn warn of AI-fascism, they are typically pointing beyond AI itself toward the role of corporations and the legal and political framework in which AI is developed. On the other hand, when Amodei dreams of “machines of loving grace,” he is imagining an enlightened scientific and political world in which AI can work its wonders.
The critical conversation about AI should lead toward a critical conversation about the whole of human culture. Discussions of technology are always ultimately bigger than the tools themselves.
Fascism and enlightenment are, in the end, human possibilities that depend on our values and our social systems. Our tools matter less than our souls.
We ought to look carefully in the mirror as we develop AI. If this technology becomes fascist or authoritarian, that’s because it is a reflection of a dystopian tendency in our social world. And if we want to create enlightened AI, we need to work to create an enlightened society.
Andrew Fiala is a professor of philosophy and director of The Ethics Center at Fresno State.
This story was originally published August 31, 2026 at 5:00 AM with the headline “If AI is a reflection of ourselves, is it inherently good or evil? | Opinion.”
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