Artificial Intelligence (AI): Is It Good, Bad, or Ugly?

 

Dr. Salman Ghouri

The world is undergoing a transformation driven by the exponential growth of artificial intelligence (AI) - a pace of unprecedented change in human history. Consequently, generally people are fear of huge unemployment that will affect their livelihood and quality of life. Is this truly the case? Yes… or perhaps not entirely.

Throughout history, every major invention has reshaped society and improved human life. Electricity, automobiles, airplanes, refrigerators, washing machines, medical technologies, farming tools, and countless household gadgets have all contributed to greater comfort and efficiency. Did these innovations create mass unemployment? Or did they enhance human productivity and quality of life? The answer is clear: they improved our lives. Should we expect the same from AI?

The purpose of this short article is to explore the potential benefits of AI and its implications for human society.

A Brief Look Back

History shows that technological inventions bring continuous improvements in economic productivity, efficiency, and quality of life. Many innovations that were once considered luxuries eventually became essential parts of everyday living.

Consider the invention of the typewriter in the 18th century, which revolutionized 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—trained in the United States—would proudly show regression results generated by computers in seconds, replacing hours of manual calculations. Each time a breakthrough occurred, humanity felt it had reached its peak. Yet progress continued, and it will continue until the end of time.

Modern inventions such as smartphones, the internet, and apps like WhatsApp and Facebook have made communication instantaneous and nearly cost-free. They have even reduced the need for travel, as people can see and speak to loved ones whenever they wish.

However, these conveniences have come with subtle costs. Our memory capacity has weakened. We once remembered phone numbers, spellings, and grammar rules. Today, we rely on devices to correct our mistakes and store our information. Without realizing it, we have become dependent on these tools—sometimes to the point of forgetting our own phone numbers.

The Rise of AI

AI is not new. Its foundations were laid in the 1940s and 1950s, with significant progress in the 1980s. But investment surged in the 2020s, driven by the development of transformer architectures and large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT. These models demonstrate human‑like traits—knowledge, reasoning, creativity—and have rapidly integrated into countless sectors.

This exponential growth has sparked both excitement and concern. Many fear that AI will lead to mass unemployment, reducing consumer spending and slowing global GDP growth. Yet history suggests otherwise. Innovations in farming increased yields and shifted labor to other sectors. Industrial automation displaced some jobs but created new ones. Medical advancements have improved life expectancy and productivity. Every major revolution has ultimately increased disposable income and improved quality of life.

Unemployment in developing countries today is largely due to poor governance and slow adoption of modern technologies, not technological progress itself.

Will AI Be Different?

Some argue that AI is fundamentally different from past inventions and could indeed cause widespread unemployment. We cannot stop or slow down AI’s exponential progress. Therefore, policymakers, economists, philosophers, and academics must urgently debate how to manage its consequences—economic, social, psychological, and cultural.

AI already performs tasks once handled by receptionists, telephone operators, analysts, and many professionals. Autonomous vehicles, drone deliveries, and robotic automation are advancing rapidly. The impact could be far greater than anything we have seen. Ask anything to ChatGPT and you are amazed in seconds you will get enormous and precise information. You would like to edit some of your writings, just copy and paste ChatGPT and you will get multiple formal or informal edited versions of your thoughts. This is simple, if you like to deal with more comprehensive and complicated models, buy subscriptions of AI that makes your life easier.

My assessment is that AI is fundamentally different from past inventions. In the past, we delegated manual labor and deterministic computation to machines, but we never delegated cognition to them. There were always an input and an expected output — understood and well controlled by humans. That may not be the case anymore. We’re entering an age where an entity could become smarter than us before our eyes, and that’s something humanity has never really experienced before. In fact, all innovations of the recent past have been part of AI and without we as a user felt that we are dealing with AI models in our daily life. For example, Alsa plays white Noice, Alsa set cooking timer, our lights setting on/off, sprinkler system automatically skips if there is rain. More specifically, thermostats that control our AC cooling/heating learns our habits and timings of comfort and adjust them automatically to the desired level without being noticed! Last week I was watching TV, where someone on the street was painting, and playing music. IT guys came to them and asked them how much they earn daily. They said $200. The guy gives them gloves and asked them to wear them while painting and playing music and he agrees to pay them $500 daily. As soon as they wear these gloves their hand motions were directly fed into data base and after a week, AI can generate the pictures and start playing the same music. This is how AI database is developed.  

Incredible. It appears that AI chapter is different as it converges with all the past innovations, our experience, thinking, assessments, how things are made all in one AI model. With the passage of time as more data is added and processed into the database it further improves and makes our life much easier and more comfortable. Like our fear in the past that new innovations will create huge unemployment, hopefully it will not but add more comfort in our life. I strongly believe AI can bring incredible benefits to human civilization, but only if its development and use are carefully regulated. The potential is huge, but so are the risks. Are you ready?

The Real Danger

A moderate and balanced pace of AI development would allow society to adapt gradually without panicking. But uncontrolled growth could be dangerous, perhaps even catastrophic. Currently, AI is growing exponentially. At some point, it may exceed human capacity to control it. Science fiction movies have imagined machines destroying civilization. Those were fictional stories—but the underlying concern is real.

More troubling is the subtle erosion of human thinking. We increasingly rely on AI tools for quick answers, analysis, and decision‑making. Over time, unused cognitive abilities weaken. If we depend entirely on AI, we risk becoming slaves to the very systems we created. A single glitch in a supercomputer could trigger catastrophic consequences.

Is this how the world ends? Or will humanity—like it has always done—adapt to new realities and continue striving for a better, more comfortable life for future generations? AI should neither be feared blindly nor embraced uncritically. It should be developed, regulated and used responsibly, so that its immense potential can benefit humanity without undermining human judgment and independence. A harmonious joke this article is also edited by AI!