There’s been a lot of talk in recent weeks about a “white-collar blood bath,” a scenario in the near future in which many college-educated workers are replaced by artificial intelligence programs that do their jobs faster and better.

Dario Amodei, the chief executive of the A.I. company Anthropic, recently predicted that half of entry-level positions in fields like law, consulting and finance could meet this fate in just a few years. Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, has predicted that A.I. will replace many of Meta’s programmers within the next year or two.

Optimists push back with a different prediction, forecasting that A.I. won’t replace white-collar workers but will rather serve as a tool that makes them more productive. Jensen Huang, the chief executive of the computer chip maker Nvidia, has argued that “you’re not going to lose your job to an A.I., but you’re going to lose your job to someone who uses A.I.”

Both sides in this debate are making the same mistake: They treat the question as one of fate rather than choice. Instead of asking which future is coming, we should be asking which future we want: one in which humans are replaced or only augmented?

The decision will depend on companies like Anthropic and OpenAI and whether they want to build ethical, sustainable technologies — as they say they do. In that case, they should design A.I. that works hand-in-hand with humans, rather than trying to build autonomous systems to replace us. Equally if not more important are the employers who adopt A.I. systems: If they really want productivity gains, they too must embrace A.I. programs that augment rather than replace.

The distinction between augmentation and replacement can be subtle. Any technology — from the stone ax onward — replaces some human work in the course of augmenting it. The key question is whether the tool enhances our abilities while still leaving us in control of how to use it. As Steve Jobs once put it, a computer can be “a bicycle of the mind.” Just as a word processor allows writers to write without having to laboriously correct and retype manuscripts, so too A.I. should help humans devote ourselves to our most significant and interesting challenges.