Consider the following comments on artificial intelligence.
We taught machines to imitate thought and now mistake the imitation for the thing itself.
Every tool we build to save labour quietly redraws who is allowed to do the work.
A machine can answer the question, but only a person can decide it was worth asking.
The danger is not that machines will think like us, but that we will start thinking like them.
We fear the intelligence we are building far less than we should fear the laziness it invites.
Write a piece in response to one or more of these comments. Your essay will be assessed on the quality of your argument and the way you express it.
A way into this prompt
A defensible thesis is that artificial intelligence is neither a saviour nor a coming tyrant, but a mirror that magnifies whatever priorities its makers already hold. Open by granting the optimist's case, that machines now diagnose, translate and predict in ways that genuinely extend human reach. Then complicate it: a system trained on our past will reproduce our past, so the question of whose data and whose values are encoded becomes a question of power, not engineering. A strong third move separates capability from judgement, since a model can produce a fluent answer without any sense of whether the answer should shape a life. Caution: resist both the breathless claim that intelligence has been solved and the reflexive dread that treats every automation as the end of human worth.