My New Colleagues, the Little Green Men

AI is not our enemy, but a powerful tool that questions us about our own humanity. Let us learn to guide it so that it augments us, without ever enslaving us. Easy to say, but how to do it?

AI, a Peculiar Partner: From the Threat of Replacement to the Reality of Collaboration

In 2025, the debate on artificial intelligence is saturated with anxiety-inducing background noise. We read almost everywhere that employers now prefer AI to recent graduates. A recent study for the Indeed platform even reveals that 52% of French recruiters find it simpler and more economical to train an AI than to hire a beginner. This statistic, which echoes the fears of many sectors, from artists to journalists, seems to paint a dark future for human employment. Yet, this vision is, in my view, partial because it confuses two distinct notions: the task and the profession.

I observe that tasks for which artificial intelligence proves more efficient than a human will, logically and inevitably, benefit from its contribution. But AI, in its current state, has no real autonomy. It needs to be piloted, directed, controlled. Far from making human experience obsolete, it makes it, on the contrary, more precious. The skills and knowledge derived from our professional paths and our learning are precisely those that can be put at the service of good use and good control of artificial intelligences. An analysis by Gartner confirms this, estimating that by 2030, 75% of work in new technologies will be carried out not by AI alone, but by a human “augmented” by AI.

It is therefore inaccurate, today, to give in to the panic of an imminent if not total replacement. AI complements us with great efficiency on missions that, until recently, seemed to be the preserve of human intelligence. But “complementing” in no way means “replacing.” As philosopher Gilbert Simondon wrote in On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, the machine is not an enemy or a slave, but a human reality that extends and amplifies our own capabilities. AI is the extension of our reasoning capacity, and it is up to us to intelligently integrate it into our professions.

Humanity, the Indispensable Supervisor of Artificial Intelligence

Our true added value in the face of the machine lies precisely in what differentiates us from simple algorithmic reasoning. It is our humanity, made of sensitivity, ethics, intuition, lived experience, that constitutes the indispensable safeguard for artificial intelligence to function properly. The experiments conducted so far, such as the entirely autonomous management of a shop by an AI, have proven deplorable, if not delirious. But of course, this will improve. The machine excels at optimization, but it lacks the common sense, empathy, and capacity to adapt to the unexpected that characterize humans.

Perhaps one day these systems will be sufficiently developed to manage a shop autonomously or any other task with real responsibility, but in 2025, we are still very far from that. We must guard against fantastical science fiction visions and remain lucid about what these tools are: formidable multipliers of our capabilities. They are disturbing because they touch the heart of what we thought was our preserve: intelligence and the production of knowledge. They induce profound anthropological changes, but this new “mechanical life” that is coming is not equivalent to ours. It is different, complementary. Moreover, the very cost of these technologies is a brake on their domination: Gartner emphasizes that for 65% of IT departments, investing in AI does not reach a profitability threshold, with humans remaining necessary to reduce costs.

Faced with this modification of reality, our responsibility is twofold. On the one hand, we must increase our knowledge of these devices and learn to use them. On the other hand, and this is the most important, we must cultivate what makes us human. As Albert Camus said: “True generosity toward the future lies in giving everything to the present.” Giving to the present means investing in our capacity for judgment, our ethics, and our critical sense to frame the development of AI and maintain it in its rightful place: that of a tool in the service of humanity.

Piloting Our “Little Green Men” and Reinventing the Social Contract

I like to call artificial intelligences our “little green men.” They are our new workers, super-intelligent, far more competent than we are at tasks we thought were our preserve. This situation is a tremendous opportunity for questioning. The old “blue collars” were often perceived as less intelligent than “white collars”; our educational system is still largely structured on this distinction. Today, our new “workers” are entities capable of dazzling intellectual abstraction. This forces us to redefine value, no longer just on raw intellectual capacity, but on wisdom, direction, and purpose.

This new economic reality, where a growing share of value production will be carried out by non-human agents, compels us to think of new modes of organization. Sam Altman himself, the head of OpenAI, has been reflecting for years on the consequences of this revolution. Long before the launch of ChatGPT, he was already exploring avenues such as universal basic income (UBI), which he imagines financed by the colossal productivity gains generated by AI, in order to ensure fair redistribution of this new wealth. The stakes are high: it’s about learning to live with these “little green men,” but above all teaching them to live with us.

It is up to us to guide them so that they remain at our service. Otherwise, the risk is that the system reverses. We can already see the beginnings of this, for example at supermarket checkouts, where employees feel controlled by the machine, forced to perform gestures in an order dictated by an algorithm. In this scenario, it is no longer the human who controls the machine, but the machine that enslaves the human in the service of dehumanized efficiency. Now, the machine is never responsible. It is humans who, through technicist thinking, have made these choices. It is therefore our collective responsibility to cultivate the opposite stance: a fierce defense of humanism, ethics, and democracy, so that decision-making power never escapes us. If we exercise this responsibility, there is no reason for the world to lose its meaning and for humans to be “replaced.”