Who’s Driving This Thing?

We used to worry about robots taking our jobs.

Now the robots are making hiring decisions.

We used to worry about AI writing fake news.

Now AI decides what we see, what we believe, and who gets to speak.

And the crazy part?
We still talk about “artificial intelligence” like it’s something separate from us.

It’s not.

AI is a mirror.
A reflection of our assumptions, our data, our urgency, our blind spots.

When it gives biased results, it's not because it’s evil.
It’s because we taught it to be efficient.

Efficient at what?

That’s the real question.
Because if we don’t know the answer, the algorithm will decide for us.

And not because it's smart.
But because it doesn't care.

It doesn’t care if a résumé gets tossed because the name “sounds foreign.”
It doesn’t care if a kid gets flagged by predictive policing software.

It just optimizes.

That’s the problem.

Ethics doesn’t scale easily.
But consequences do.

So maybe before we train the next model, we stop and ask:
Who benefits from this decision?
Who gets left out?

And most importantly—

Who’s driving this thing?

If the answer is “no one,” we already know how the story ends.