Let me stipulate that I have never knowingly used A.I. and always decline its tempting offer to summarize a long document or redesign a web page. So if you are a coder or IT expert, or anyone who has ventured deeper into the artificial world than I have, feel free to disagree.

Contrary to the hyperventilating 20-somethings recently sounding a world-historical alarm, A.I. is not going to “kill us all.” I suspect that the alarmists have grown up in an online bubble and may even think their A.I. girlfriends are real. Snide remarks aside, there is still reason to consider their warnings, since A.I. is so widespread and growing in influence upon our thoughts and actions.

And this is my point. We humans may kill a whole lot of our own species and even destroy the whole biosphere with the help of A.I.—that much is true and perhaps likely. But A.I. by itself cannot kill humanity without our cooperation—we the people.

Listening to recent interviews and analyses, it seems that those working close to the online project fear that A.I. may produce an unstoppable weapon or virus that would wipe out humanity. Or it will infiltrate every website and take over military and economic systems and level 3 biolabs. Or mobilize an army of robots like skeletons rising from classically planted dragon teeth.

These scenarios are somewhat plausible. But where would A.I. get the idea, the impetus, the incentive, the purpose, the telos—the self-directing “I”—to carry out such a plan? Do we assume that A.I. will naturally be opposed to humanity? That it will naturally seek power and dominance? Or are we projecting the worst of human nature onto the machine? Worse, have coders planted such an anti-human bias, wittingly or not, into the programs of A.I.?

If this latter scenario is the case, then Houston, we may have a problem. The HAL of many nightmares may be lurking in our laptops.

But at its core, this is a human problem grown to A.I. proportions.

There are limits to the destructive force of A.I. As much as we like to think that every activity has moved online and everything online is in the “Cloud,” the fact remains that we still live in a very material world, in which the stuff of creation plays a key role. A.I. has no hands or legs, so for it to “build” a weapon or concoct a virus, in some capacity it will need to convince human workers to participate in having it play out. Of course, if it takes over autonomous weapons systems or the digital currency of a nation, A.I. could well call the shots and bribe and bully humans to do its dirty work in the physical world. But there will always be the wild card of human free will, the operations of the soul, that could frustrate, deny, undo or destroy A.I. designs. Someone may even exhibit “no greater love” than to give up his life to defend humanity from the algorithms.

In my estimation, the real danger of A.I. is not that it will become smarter than us. Like any programmed computer, it can already calculate in milliseconds equations that would take the human mind hours or days to solve. The danger is not even when A.I. will reach “technological singularity,” when one system will teach another till its knowledge becomes limitlessly beyond human comprehension. After all, one A.I. teaching another may result in a dumbing down rather than a smarting up.

No, the real danger is that we humans will begin to assess our own capacities in terms of computer programs; we will rate ourselves smart in as much as our way of thinking and “outputting” will mimic the ways of A.I. Thus, we risk limiting the true genius of the human person—the ability not only to cogitate and regurgitate data and information, but to contemplate, insinuate, infer, defer, perchance to dream and create. Whatever A.I. has, it has received from some of us. And all of us together have depth and meaning beyond the simple scope of A.I.

Yes, A.I. may come after us, but only because someone with free will and evil intent has pushed it in that direction. It’s a problem of life stretching back to Eden, and we know no human evil could destroy the plans of God.

So in the titanic apocalypse that A.I. may bring about, I will sow the seeds of hope and prayer, and cast my lot with humanity.