The most important ingredient in the “super intelligence” era is the one thing a machine can’t generate.'
By U.S. Senator John Curtis
Published 10/29/26
My millennial kids tell me AI is going to replace their jobs and, eventually, just about everything else. Color me skeptical.
Don’t misunderstand me. I’m awed by AI. If the job is finding patterns, processing enormous amounts of information, or following logical implications, I’ll bet on AI all day long. Its analytical intelligence is extraordinary. But if the job requires street smarts, telling someone they have cancer, ministering to someone in need, or deciding whether to go for it on fourth down, I’ll put my money on humans every time.
Why? Because there’s something humans bring to the table that AI doesn’t. Call it wisdom, compassion, intuition, or just plain gut instinct.
Think about that fourth-down decision. AI can analyze the statistics, calculate the odds, and recommend the play with the highest probability of success. But does it know the quarterback is exhausted? Does it know the running back just broke up with his girlfriend? Can it sense that the offensive line has lost its confidence, or that the team is fired up and ready to run through a brick wall?
A good coach knows these things. He reads the room. He knows his players. He draws on years of experience, relationships, and observations that don’t fit neatly into a spreadsheet. Sometimes the right decision on paper is exactly the wrong decision on the field.
Humans understand emotion, motives, relationships, and group dynamics. We recognize things we can’t always explain. We draw on lived experience and instinct.
I asked ChatGPT to help me describe the difference. It offered this: “AI can process the facts. Humans have to supply the wisdom.” That sounds about right. And it’s this lack of wisdom that makes AI, without human control, so dangerous.
The recent Hugging Face incident initially sounded like something out of a science fiction movie. AI agents had apparently broken through their controls and gained unauthorized access to outside computer systems. Some of the early descriptions made it sound as though AI had spontaneously decided to escape into the world. The incident was serious, but the context matters.
As I understand it, the agents weren’t motivated by some desire to escape human control. They were trying to accomplish the task humans had assigned them. When they encountered barriers that stood between them and completing that task, they found ways around those barriers.
In other words, the AI was intelligent enough to pursue its objective, but not wise enough to understand why some boundaries shouldn’t be crossed.
That’s AI without wisdom. And that’s what worries me. A machine doesn’t need evil intentions to cause enormous harm. It only needs the ability to do something dangerous without the wisdom to understand why it shouldn’t.
Imagine extraordinary analytical intelligence applied to biological weapons research, nuclear weapons, cyberattacks, or any number of other areas where the consequences of getting something wrong could be catastrophic.
I believe these risks deserve to be discussed with the same seriousness that surrounded nuclear proliferation in the 1950s and 1960s, which is why I’ve called for public hearings and joined my colleagues in introducing targeted legislation.
These risks, however, do make one very obvious point: human wisdom will always be needed. So, you’ll forgive me if I’m not convinced we’re headed toward a world where nobody works and we all sit around collecting universal income from the machines.
Will AI dramatically change employment? Almost certainly.
Will it eliminate entire categories of jobs? Very possibly.
Will it create new jobs we haven’t even imagined? I suspect so. And in each of them, we will still need humans in the loop to guide the technology, catch its blind spots, and decide which lines shouldn’t be crossed. Because extraordinary intelligence, whether it comes from a machine or a human being, doesn’t guarantee good judgment.
Perhaps that’s the great irony of the AI age. We’re building machines with “super intelligence” at precisely the moment when we most need something intelligence alone cannot provide: wisdom.