Buenos Aires, February 8, 2026 – Total News Agency-TNA– In June 2018, Henry Kissinger published an essay in The Atlantic that, read in light of the present, ceased to be futuristic reflections and became an anticipatory warning.
In one of the central passages of the text, Kissinger pointed out that the human capacity to establish causality has been the basis of its intellectual dominion. His warning remains valid: the real challenge of artificial intelligence is not what it can do, but what it can disarm if not guided by clear human principles.
Ten key ideas from Henry Kissinger on artificial intelligence
For Kissinger, humanity is not intellectually or philosophically prepared for artificial intelligence, whose development advances faster than the ability to understand its historical, moral, and cognitive implications. He considered that AI inaugurates a rupture comparable—or even superior—to the printing press, which gave rise to the Enlightenment, but which could now put an end to the mental framework that it created.
Unlike previous technologies, artificial intelligence not only automates means, but redefines ends, learning and optimizing without direct human intervention. The threat, he argued, is not technical but cultural: a world in which human beings are no longer the main explainers of their own experience.
The text culminated with a question that transcends artificial intelligence: whether human civilization will be able to preserve a concept of meaning in a world that no longer explains itself.
In politics, this reduces the capacity for strategic reflection, pushing leaders to react against fragmented pressures. Artificial intelligence, in addition, can make mistakes faster and with greater impact than humans, amplifying failures on a massive scale.
Where does legitimacy reside when the decision-making process is a “black box”?
Throughout the text, Kissinger suggested that artificial intelligence not only challenges institutions, but the very fabric of modern reality: the set of shared assumptions that allow a society to understand what it means to know, decide, and govern.
In that process, knowledge ceases to be understandable: the systems produce effective results without human explanations, eroding the notion of rational understanding. Kissinger also warned that the human cognitive process weakens in the digital era, where immediacy and fragmentation replace deep reflection.
The development of artificial intelligence, driven by technical, commercial, and strategic incentives, still lacks an ethical and humanistic framework equivalent to that of modernity.
Sources consulted:
The Atlantic, archives and essays by Henry Kissinger, academic analyses on artificial intelligence, studies of political philosophy and technology.
If that judgment is replaced or conditioned by systems that surpass human understanding, the notion of responsibility itself enters into crisis. Without intending to, it transforms human values by exclusively optimizing for efficiency or victory, altering the sense of activities such as learning, play, or deliberation.
Finally, Kissinger emphasized that humanity is creating a dominant technology without a philosophy to guide it. Artificial intelligence, he argued, introduces for the first time a rupture in that agreement, by generating knowledge without reproducing the human cognitive process that gave it meaning.
The core of his concern was not that machines would come to think like human beings, but precisely the opposite. Kissinger warned that artificial intelligence systems operate through opaque processes, not transparent or comprehensible to the human mind.
In a key warning, he stated that technology advances faster than the human capacity to formulate the principles that govern it, a gap that historically has preceded deep crises of the established order.
Far from alarmism, Kissinger's approach was classic and strategic. He did not propose to stop technological development, but to integrate it without destroying the human frameworks of understanding that sustain responsibility, legitimacy, and historical sense.
At almost a decade of its publication, Henry Kissinger's essay anticipated debates that today cross through democracy, war, journalism, science, and global politics.
The risk, he warned, is that truth ceases to be something verifiable through human reasoning, not because it is false, but because it becomes inaccessible. The essay also focused on leadership and decision-making.
Artificial intelligence, in turn, does not need to understand causes: it detects massive correlations, learns from them, and produces effective results without offering intelligible explanations. Truth, he pointed out, becomes relative and personalized, dissolving shared consensus.
For Kissinger, human judgment has been historically the decisive element in the great moments of history. Under the title “How the Enlightenment Ends,” the former US Secretary of State did not address artificial intelligence as a simple technological innovation, but as a phenomenon capable of altering the very foundations of knowledge, truth, and the modern civilizational order.
From the start, Kissinger posed a disruptive thesis: the Enlightenment had defined the modern era by entrusting the discovery of truth to human reason, establishing a historical pact based on causality, explanation, and understanding.
Who answers for a correct but inexplicable decision?
His central concern was not the dominion of machines, but the possible progressive irrelevance of human understanding as the ultimate arbiter of truth. Knowledge thus ceases to be something that is understood to become something that simply works.
