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By Dyllan Tipton
Will we be the controllers of AI, or will AI control us? To put this into perspective, in 2010 we might have asked the same question about smartphones.
I recently read The Anxious Generation with my fellow McConnell Scholars, and it left a lasting impression. The book argues that childhood has shifted dramatically, moving from a world of play and imagination to one dominated by screens. This phone-based upbringing has had profound and often devastating effects on children’s mental health and daily lives. As a society, we have largely failed to address the harmful consequences of social media and pervasive technology. Now, a new challenge emerges. Students have unrestricted access to software that functions like a whole new brain, artificial intelligence. The question is no longer just how we manage technology, but how we guide the next generation in a world where AI becomes an extension of their minds.
In an August 2025 NBC news report,
Open AI reported that their company expected “to hit 700 million weekly active users.” Students, employees, business owners, government officials, and almost all people have been directly used or have been exposed to AI. AI usage will only continue to grow all over the world.
Elon Musk offered one of the more striking metaphors. Musk, who owns his own AI company, xAI, with a chatbot named Grok,
suggested
at the U.S.–Saudi Investment Forum in Washington, D.C., that within the next 10 to 20 years, work itself may become optional—something done “for fun,” not necessity. He compared future employment to maintaining a backyard vegetable garden:
suggested
at the U.S.–Saudi Investment Forum in Washington, D.C., that within the next 10 to 20 years, work itself may become optional—something done “for fun,” not necessity. He compared future employment to maintaining a backyard vegetable garden:
“My prediction is that work will be optional. It’ll be like playing sports or a video game… If you want to work, [it’s] the same way you can go to the store and just buy some vegetables, or you can grow vegetables in your backyard. It’s much harder to grow vegetables in your backyard, and some people still do it because they like growing vegetables.”
It’s a provocative vision: humans as metaphorical vegetable farmers in a world where AI does the plowing, harvesting, and distribution. Some hear this and imagine liberation; others hear it and sense a profound risk of dependency. If this becomes reality, I
am indeed concerned for our future.
We must stand up for human creativity, thought, and progress. These are not relics to be preserved out of sentimentality; they are the engines of our culture, our republic, and our sense of meaning. If we want AI to serve humanity rather than replace it, then we must defend and cultivate the uniquely human capacities that no machine can authentically replicate.
Make no mistake—I do believe that AI will be extraordinarily useful in many respects. But our society must recognize that if we allow AI to do everything for us, we risk losing the very skills that empower us. We must learn how to integrate and apply this technology in ways that support, rather than dominate, our daily lives. Because what happens when the computer becomes unplugged? If we have outsourced too much of ourselves, we will no longer know what to do.
Regardless of what I think, AI will continue to accelerate at a rapid pace. With numerous companies competing in the marketplace, innovation will intensify. And we cannot ignore that our foreign adversaries are developing their own forms of AI to enhance their militaries. We will be in perpetual competition with them. AI will undoubtedly shape the nature of future military conflicts and redefine global power in ways we are only beginning to understand.
In the end, the question of whether we will control AI or be controlled by it will be answered not by the technology itself, but by the choices we make today. We stand at a pivotal moment, much like we did at the dawn of the smartphone era. Only now are the stakes far greater. If we approach AI with wisdom, restraint, and a commitment to preserving what makes us human, then this new technology can become a powerful tool for progress rather than a force that erodes our independence. But if we treat it with the
same complacency that allowed social media to reshape an entire generation, we risk surrendering our agency before we even realize it is slipping away. The future will not wait for us to catch up. We must meet it with intention, courage, and unwavering resolve, because if we fail to guide this technology, it will guide us, and the loss may be nothing less than our very sense of what it means to be human.
Dyllan is a McConnell Scholar at the University of Louisville in the class of 2026. He is studying political science.