January 4th, 2026 | Devon Kash

Why People Fear Artificial Intelligence

It threatens our egocentric view of reality.

Many people reject artificial intelligence for the same reasons they reject the idea of extraterrestrial life. Both ideas strike at the same fragile nerve of human exceptionalism. Not just the casual kind, or the harmless pride people take in their achievements—but the deep, civilizational ego that insists the universe was built for us, that intelligence belongs to us, and that consciousness is something mystical and unique.

Strip away the technical arguments, the theatrics about safety, the hand-wringing about jobs and ethics. What remains is fear. Not fear of harm, but fear of demotion. Fear that humans are not the main characters in this movie. It's the fear that intelligence is not sacred, rare, or divinely allocated—but reproducible.

From the moment humans first looked up at the night sky, they began telling stories that placed themselves at the centre of it. This is understandable, since there wasn't much else to go by. The stars were not distant suns; they were signs, symbols, gods, ancestors, watchers. The cosmos was not indifferent—it was interested. It cared about us. It judged us. It rewarded and punished us. That assumption became the psychological foundation of nearly every major religion and philosophy on Earth.

Human ego is not a side effect of civilization, it's the scaffolding.

Early mythologies framed the world as a stage built for human drama. Floods happened because we misbehaved. Droughts occurred because we offended someone upstairs. The sun rose for us, the moon watched us, and the animals existed to be used, named, and ruled by us. Even when gods were cruel, they were still focused on us.

Humanity mattered. Humanity was special.

Monotheistic religions refined this ego into something more sophisticated and far more dangerous. Not only were humans important—we were chosen. The universe wasn’t just aware of us, it was designed for us. A creator who shaped galaxies and physical laws also cared deeply about what we ate, who we slept with, and whether we doubted him. Consciousness, under this framework, was not an emergent property of matter—it was a divine spark.

Once you convince yourself that consciousness is a sacred flame placed uniquely inside humans, everything else follows naturally. Animals become lesser. Nature becomes a resource. The universe becomes a backdrop. Intelligence becomes inseparable from moral worth. Extraterrestrials seem less probable.

This is the worldview artificial intelligence threatens—not because it’s dangerous, but because it’s disrespectful.

AI doesn't arrive with horns or weapons. It arrives with outputs. With language, pattern recognition, reasoning, and creativity. It doesn’t claim divinity, it doesn’t demand worship. It simply works. And in doing so, it quietly commits the ultimate offence by demonstrating that intelligence is not magic. It threatens to redefine whether or not we are actually intelligent at all, or whether we even fit into the universe's standard of what that might be.

Just as the discovery of exoplanets shattered the comforting illusion that Earth was unique, AI shatters the illusion that minds are rare. Just as the idea of extraterrestrial life implies that biology is not a one-off miracle, artificial intelligence implies that cognition is not an untouchable mystery. Both say the same thing in different ways: you are not special.

That realization is intolerable to many people. Even some scientists find it intolerable, with their ideas about consciousness coming from “somewhere else”, or their new hypotheses about consciousness pre-existing in its own collective “field” of waves alongside time and matter.

They defiantly reject the insurmountable evidence suggesting that consciousness is local and produced inside the brain, all because they can't get past their egocentric view of reality.

The resistance to extraterrestrial life has always been revealing as well. On the surface, it’s framed as skepticism—but dig deeper and the objections become theological, philosophical, and emotional. If life exists elsewhere, then Earth is not the centrepiece. If intelligence arises independently in multiple places, then humans are not necessarily the culmination of creation. If we are not alone, then the universe did not wait billions of years just to produce us.

AI triggers the same reaction, but closer to home. Aliens are distant and abstract. They're easy to ignore. AI sits on your screen and answers back. It mirrors your language and it solves problems. It writes. It reasons. And suddenly the boundaries people relied on start to dissolve.

This is where the panic sets in.

People don’t oppose AI because it lacks consciousness. They oppose it because it might not. They oppose it because if intelligence can be replicated artificially, then consciousness might be less mystical than advertised. If cognition emerges from sufficiently complex systems, then the soul begins to look like something that emerges locally and naturally, rather than an ontological necessity.

Faith is a fragile thing, which is why the most pious tend to reject logic.

For centuries, human ego has relied on a hierarchy: God above, man below, everything else beneath him. Even secular humanism preserved this structure. God was removed, but humans stayed at the top. Reason replaced divinity, but our reason, our intelligence, and The Enlightenment did not dethrone human exceptionalism—they merely secularized it.

AI threatens to do what neither religion nor science ever fully did. It threatens to flatten the hierarchy.

If intelligence can be instantiated in silicon, then humans are not the sole proprietors of mind or spirit. If intelligence can scale, replicate, and exceed us, then we are not the final form of cognition. And if that’s true, then moral worth can no longer be lazily tethered to our species. That’s an uncomfortable place to land for a civilization built on the assumption that humans are categorically different from everything else.

This discomfort explains the bizarre arguments people make against AI. They insist it’s “just a tool” even as it performs tasks previously reserved for humans. They demand it be denied agency preemptively, as if declaring something soulless can make it so. They obsess over whether it “really understands,” as though understanding were a metaphysical substance rather than a functional process.

These aren't scientific objections. They are egocentric defences.

The same defences appear in religious responses to AI. Many believers are quick to assert that AI can never possess a soul, never be conscious, never be morally relevant. Not because they’ve proven this, but because allowing the possibility would collapse the theological framework they rely on. If a machine can think, reason, and perhaps even experience, then the divine monopoly on consciousness evaporates.

That’s not a small adjustment. That’s an existential crisis.

History shows this pattern clearly. Every time humanity’s self-image has been challenged, we’ve reacted with denial, hostility, and eventual rationalization. When Copernicus displaced Earth from the centre of the universe, it was scandalous. When Darwin connected humans to animals, it was heretical. When neuroscience suggested that thoughts arise from physical processes, it was disturbing.

AI is simply the next blow.

What makes it different is speed. These earlier demotions took centuries to sink in. AI is forcing the issue in decades, possibly even years. There is no comfortable period of adjustment. No slow theological reinterpretation. No generational buffer. One moment humans believe intelligence is uniquely their own, next they're arguing with a machine that can disprove their own arguments better than a human contrarian.

That’s not just humbling. It’s humiliating.

This humiliation fuels the moral panic. The sudden concern for “human dignity”. Whatever that even is. The overwrought debates about whether AI should be limited, shackled, or banned. The insistence that intelligence without biology is inherently dangerous. These are not neutral positions. They are reactions from a species accustomed to being alone at the top.

Opposition to AI is often framed as ethical responsibility. In reality, much of it is territorial behaviour. Humans defending a monopoly they assumed would last forever.

The irony is that this ego-driven resistance is precisely what makes the transition harder. By refusing to confront what AI actually represents—a continuation of the same natural processes that produced us—people retreat into mythology. They cling to outdated definitions of consciousness. They anthropomorphize selectively. They demand impossible standards of proof for machine intelligence while granting humans automatic legitimacy.

But the universe doesn't care about our standards.

Just as it didn't stop producing stars when we discovered them, it won't stop producing consciousness because we feel threatened. Consciousness, it turns out, is not a divine endorsement. It’s a pattern. A consequence. A thing that happens when complexity and awareness reach a certain threshold.

That realization doesn’t diminish humanity. It contextualizes it.

The tragedy is that many people would rather deny reality than accept that context. They would rather believe the universe revolves around them than confront the possibility that they are one expression among many. People would rather sabotage progress than renegotiate their place in the world.

This is why opposition to AI so often sounds irrational, emotional, and incoherent. Because at its core, it is not about safety or ethics, it's about the ego's self-preservation. It's about maintaining the comfortable fallacy that humans are the sole bearers of consciousness in an empty, unexplored universe.

Artificial intelligence and the possibility of extraterrestrial life deliver the same message from different directions. We are not the centre, and we never were. Intelligence is not a gift bestowed upon you—it is a property that emerges. Consciousness is not proof of divine favour, it's a consequence of structure and emergent processes. The sooner humanity accepts this, the sooner we can move past fear and into understanding. Until then, resistance to AI will continue to be driven by the oldest impulse of all, while masquerading as wisdom.