It is difficult these days to attend a conference, browse social media, or sit through a university meeting without hearing the same refrain: artificial intelligence (AI) is here, and we had better learn to adapt. There is a sense of urgency in the air. Schools are being urged to redesign their curricula. Workers are told to upskill before they become obsolete. Governments are crafting policies to harness the promises of AI. Everywhere, one hears variations of the same message: adapt or be left behind.
No one, of course, wishes to be left behind.
And yet, I wonder if something important gets lost when adaptation is presented as the only sensible response. Beneath the excitement and the anxiety lies an assumption that deserves closer scrutiny. It is the idea that because something is technologically possible, it must therefore be socially desirable.
History is full of moments when societies embraced innovations with great optimism, only to discover later that the consequences were more complicated than anticipated. Technologies solve problems, but they also create new ones. They open possibilities while closing off others. They reshape not only the way we work but also the way we think, relate, and imagine ourselves.
Perhaps what is striking about the current conversation on AI is not the technology itself, but the absence of any serious discussion about resistance. To speak of resistance today risks being branded as reactionary, antiprogress, or hopelessly nostalgic. One gets the impression that the future has already been decided and that our only responsibility is to prepare ourselves for it.
But societies are not simply passive recipients of technological change. They have always negotiated with it, shaped it, and, when necessary, resisted its excesses.
Resistance, in this sense, should not be understood as a refusal to use technology. It is not a call to abandon AI or retreat into some imagined past. Rather, it is the insistence that technological developments remain subject to human judgment. It is the assertion that efficiency is not the highest value around which societies should organize themselves.
This, I think, is where the social sciences and the humanities find their continuing relevance.
For some time now, these disciplines have been asked to justify their existence in increasingly utilitarian terms. Students are encouraged to pursue courses that are deemed marketable. Universities speak the language of innovation, competitiveness, and employability.
Against this backdrop, sociology, philosophy, history, literature, and anthropology often appear quaint, even expendable.
But perhaps these are precisely the disciplines that teach us to ask the questions that machines cannot answer.
What kind of society do we wish to build? Which inequalities might new technologies deepen? What forms of knowledge are being privileged, and whose voices are being marginalized? What happens when human beings come to see themselves primarily as repositories of data, measured according to metrics of efficiency and productivity?
These are not technical questions. They are moral and political questions.
I sometimes worry that our fascination with AI reflects a deeper cultural tendency. It is the tendency to treat every aspect of life as something that must be optimized. Faster communication. Faster learning. Faster decisions. Faster production. Speed and efficiency have become virtues in themselves.
But many of the things that give meaning to human life resist optimization. Friendship develops slowly. Trust is built over time. Grief cannot be hurried. Love does not follow algorithms. Democracy itself depends on deliberation, disagreement, and patience. It is a profoundly inefficient enterprise, and perhaps that is precisely what makes it human.
One suspects that what is at stake in the age of AI is not merely the future of work, but the future of our understanding of what it means to be human.
The prevailing wisdom tells us that adaptation is inevitable. There is truth in this. We cannot simply wish away technological change. But inevitability is often an exaggerated claim made by every age about itself. Human history is not merely a story of passive adjustment. It is also a history of critique, hesitation, and refusal.
Every generation inherits forces it did not create. But no generation is exempt from deciding what ought to be accepted and what deserves to be resisted.
Perhaps this is the task that falls upon the social sciences and the humanities today. It is not to wage war against AI, nor to celebrate it uncritically. Rather, it is to preserve spaces where questions may still be asked, where doubt remains possible, and where the future is understood not as destiny but as a field of choices.
For in the end, progress is not measured solely by what machines can do. It is measured by what human beings, in their wisdom, decide ought to be done.
Prince Kennex R. Aldama is a sociologist in the Department of Social Sciences, University of the Philippines Los Baños. He was president of the Philippine Sociological Society.