Prometheus, in ancient Greek mythology, is the figure who steals fire from the gods and gives it to humanity. Here, fire represents not only warmth, but also technology, skill, and the power to transform the world. When Prometheus takes this power from the gods and gives it to humans, Zeus punishes him severely. He is chained to a rock on a mountainside, and every day an eagle comes and eats his liver. The half-devoured liver grows back during the night, and the pain begins again the next day. From this story we draw the lesson that if you bring something immensely powerful down into the world, the cost will be great, and that cost will not be paid only once. It will return again and again.

Humanity, in its obsession with creating artificial general intelligence and autonomous robots, stands at the same threshold as Prometheus stealing fire from the gods. Because the issue is no longer simply building a tool that speeds up work. What is at stake now is a kind of “cognitive fire” that scales mental activities such as language generation, persuasion, summarization, coding, research, and decision preparation. When lit in the right place, this fire expands human capacity: it makes writing easier, thins the walls between languages, accelerates access to knowledge, and lightens routine tasks. But when lit in the wrong place, it starts a fire: unverified content erodes trust, misinformation becomes cheaper, and “speed” begins to replace accuracy. More critically, once these systems begin to make decisions, they both increase the risk of injustice and leave the question “Who is responsible?” unanswered.

This is why, instead of reducing the debate to the easy question of whether AI is good or bad, we need to make a clearer distinction: where are we lighting the fire? Fire in a hearth gives warmth, but fire released into a forest burns it down. Using it in the hearth means treating AI not as a decision-maker but as a decision preparer: it drafts, summarizes, and generates options, while the human verifies, constructs the justification, and carries responsibility. Using it in the forest means treating its output as reality without evidence, handing critical outcomes over to automation, and closing control gates for the sake of speed.

Prometheus’s eagle no longer appears today as a single catastrophe, but rather as a recurring cost driven by haste, dependency, erosion of trust, and institutional laziness. The solution is not to extinguish the fire, but to tame it. That means setting clear boundaries: what data may be entered, which tasks must not be left to automation, how outputs will be verified, ensuring traceability, conducting independent testing, and having mechanisms that can shut the system down immediately when necessary.

Fire does not go back. But whether we turn it into a force that builds civilization or a disaster that burns the forest is up to us. This is too important to be left solely to market competition and global power struggles.