Machines are stripping away humanity in much the same way social media and texting have stripped away our personal communication skills. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not against technology. I just believe that it should be used as a tool we control instead of it dictating our lives.

Used to be life was simple but hard. Now it’s complicated and easy. Used to be we lived in a real world where real people worked out real problems. Now we live in an empty, artificial programmable world where nothing is real nor honest anymore.

Let’s face it: We’re dumbed down and turned lazy by technology that supposedly makes life easier for us. It controls our homes, runs our cars, monitors our health. Our problems have been turned over to machine to fix. We have apps that perform every conceivable function for us, virtual assistants—Siri and Alexa—that give us advice.

Now with the advances in artificial intelligence, science fiction has become real life.

Artificial intelligence is defined as the theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks normally requiring human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages. In other words, it’s intelligence demonstrated by machines, in contrast to the natural intelligence displayed by humans and other animals.

Yes, we’re turning the world over to machines, and we’re turning jobs over to them, too. But not all jobs.

A recent TopTenz post identifies 10 jobs artificial intelligence can’t take away from humans. They are:

• Authors
• Fashion designers and tailors
• Psychologists
• Doctors
• Musicians
• Police officers
• Judges
• Art teachers
• Pro athletes
• Clergy

The jobs listed here have a few common traits that indeed separate humans from machines. They are:

• Creativity—the ability to use our human imagination to develop new and original ideas or things.
• Empathy—the ability to identify with and understand another person’s feelings.
• Sympathy—the ability to share another person’s feelings.
• Judgment—the ability to determine right from wrong.
• Passion—the ability to show emotions.

We must remember that artificial intelligence is not natural. It’s contrived, simulated, and will never replace human intelligence, no matter how cool it might seem.

We must remember the great things humans have created and remember today’s machines were created by humans.

We must remember that we are humans and machines are tools. We must remember that we control our lives, and we must regain control of our lives or we risk creating a world gone astray.

Photo by Andy Kelly on Unsplash