AI in "Modern Times"

In 1936, Charlie Chaplin presented in Modern Times one of the most powerful images in the history of industrial labor: a man trapped inside a machine, repeating frantic movements while production continues without pause. The scene is both absurd and unsettling. The worker no longer appears to be a human being, but rather another component of the productive mechanism.Chaplin was not exaggerating. He was portraying an era marked by assembly-line production, economic crisis, and the fear that technology might ultimately reduce human beings to a mere extension of the machine. Almost a century later, a new technological revolution is awakening the same fear. Artificial intelligence appears at the center of public debate accompanied by a recurring question: will machines replace human beings? However, this question is based on an assumption inherited from the industrial era. It assumes that technology can only integrate into human work in one way: by subordinating humans to machines.