The fear that AI and robots will destroy the future really stems not from the machine but from humanity's age-old greed and its hunger to monopolise power. As the cost of intelligence and labour approaches zero, the world will either step into an age of boundless shared prosperity or fall victim to its own primitiveness in the grip of digital feudalism. At this historic crossroads, as the era of cheap labour closes, Türkiye's real task is not to race against machines but to come out of this great test victorious by turning minds, education and production from contract manufacturing into high added value. Because our fate will be decided not by algorithms but by our own conscience.
Everyone is talking about robots taking over the world. When I look out from inside the jar, I see something else: a human being who has been handed a brand-new power but still lives with the old appetite. Türkiye, too, enters this test forced to close the ledger of cheap labour and open the ledger of added value.
Lately, whatever table I sit at, whatever conversation I join, the subject keeps coming back to the same place. AI, robots, “are they going to finish us off?” I usually keep quiet and listen, and think: people fear most what they themselves have done. Throughout history, whoever seized power crushed the weak, plundered resources and wrote the rules in their own interest. Now we are terrified that something smarter than us will appear and do the same to us. So what we fear is not the machine but our own record. A chip has no greed, no appetite, no urge to outdo the neighbours. All of that is in us.
Today we try to understand the world economy by looking at interest-rate decisions, stock indices and trade deficits. But underneath, a completely different fault line is shifting, and it cannot be read with those indicators. Machines will not take over the world. But humans who have power without maturity can do that on their own. They do not need robots for it.
The first danger is the question of who owns what. A factory once employed a hundred people; now it has ten and a lot of machines. Who gets the gains? A small minority that holds productive capital. The remaining billions face the risk of losing their means of living.
Reading this only as an unemployment figure is a big mistake. A salary is more than the money paid into your account at the end of the month. It is a reason to get out of bed in the morning, being able to say in your neighbourhood “this is the work I do,” belonging somewhere. A person who loses their job takes a blow not only to their wallet but to their identity.
The second danger is the planet's patience. AI offers us astonishing efficiency. Will we consume less with it? No. No technology has ever made us do that, and I do not think this one will. The remaining water sources, rare earth elements and forests will be consumed faster. The sharper the tool, the faster the damage comes.
The third is, I think, the least discussed: digital feudalism. Those who control data flows, chip supply chains and critical energy lines are preparing to become the feudal lords of the new age. The threat of “I will cut off your access” is replacing international law. Look at today's trade wars, technology export bans and bloc-building. They are all the first act of this struggle. As the world fragments, cooperation gets harder and geopolitical tension comes right to the brink of open conflict.
Now let us look at the other side of the coin, because it is at least as exciting. What happens if the cost of intelligence and physical labour approaches zero? Basic needs such as health, housing, clean energy and food could be taken out of the hands of speculation and become everyone's right. With new materials developed with AI, green energy and fusion, the need to extract raw materials from nature could decline, and waste-free, circular production could become real.
Better still, when the routine work that has turned people into cogs for centuries is handed over to machines, humans will for the first time get the chance to look at their own potential. There will be time for imagination, philosophy, art, science, the pleasure of making something beautifully. I see this not as robots becoming human but as humans finally becoming human. But let me add this: that door will not open by itself. In a society that does not change its order of ownership and distribution, abundance only means some people getting even richer.
Now to our own garden. For years we told ourselves this story: we have a young population, our workers are cheap, we export, we grow. To be fair, for a while it worked. Textiles, ready-to-wear, automotive supply and assembly-heavy production were the backbone of this story. But today big brands are robotising production and moving factories from where labour is cheap to where consumers are. In other words, the value of our biggest card is falling. It has to be said very plainly: for an economy that competes on cheap labour, the real threat is not the arrival of the machine, but that competitive advantage becoming meaningless overnight.
On top of that we have our structural problems. We depend on imports for energy and intermediate goods. In chips and advanced technology, we are the buyer. Years of high inflation have eroded purchasing power; grocery shopping has become a matter of careful arithmetic. The minimum wage debate comes round every year with the same tension, and labour's share of income is squeezed. A large group of young people are neither in school nor in work. Some of the best-educated are looking abroad or dreaming of leaving. In a picture like this, we have to take seriously the possibility that the wave of automation will hit hard.
But I am not hopeless, because we have cards to play as well. A young population, if trained well, is not a burden but a historic opportunity. The engineering we see in the defence industry, especially in unmanned systems, shows that this country does not have to be merely a consumer of technology. A talented generation is emerging in software, gaming and the start-up world too. Anatolia's production reflex, the knack of “I'll find a way somehow,” is a flexibility tested over many years. The task is to turn these success stories from the exception of a few sectors into the general logic of the economy.
The middle-income trap can only be escaped by moving from cheap labour to ideas, design and brands. Neither an exchange-rate adjustment nor a single interest-rate decision will solve that.
I think the first step is to change what we measure. Gross Domestic Product grows if you cut down a forest and sell it, and it grows if illness rises and drug sales go up. Reading a country's success with such a crude measure means counting the depletion of resources as success. We need new indicators that also take into account ecological balance, social welfare and people's mental development.
Second, AI models have been trained on the shared accumulation of all humanity. Books, articles, images, code: the labour of centuries. I do not think it is right for the value this creates to be locked away in the coffers of a few companies. Ideas such as universal basic income or a robot tax are easily dismissed as “utopian.” But when automation becomes widespread, what else will be offered to millions of people? Postponing this debate does not mean solving it; we are only preparing ourselves for a harsher reckoning.
Third, and closest to home: education. You cannot enter this race with a system that relies on rote learning, forgets everything after the exam and treats a diploma as a job guarantee. Tomorrow's capital is the ability to question, to understand an issue in its context, to tell right from wrong, to think with one's own conscience. A society that thinks whatever the algorithm shows it is not free, even if it has the brightest technology. That is why protecting minds must come before protecting professions.
I like to look at the world from inside the jar, because a little distance gives a person both calm and honesty. From that distance, I see this: machines gaining consciousness and becoming our masters is not as close a possibility as we think. What is closer is that we lose our conscience and virtue and become slaves to those old, familiar ambitions of ours. The new world order will not be written in silicon; it will be written in whether humanity can overcome its own selfishness.
Either we will turn this unimaginable power towards shared prosperity and repair, or we will fall victim to our own primitiveness amid the perfection of the tools we have created. The choice was never the algorithms'. It is still in our hands. We are the ones who open the lid, and we are the ones who close it.
This article was first published in the October 2026 issue of Ekonomi Dünya magazine, in the column Kavanozdaki Adam (The Man in the Jar).
