There is a curious contradiction at the heart of the debate over artificial intelligence. The people who understand the technology best are now warning us about where it could lead, while the rest of us still debate whether it is acceptable to use it to write an email.
You might worry that the local Facebook page is full of AI-generated posters for car boot sales; meanwhile experts like Evan Hubinger, alignment science lead at Anthropic, warned this week that the chance AI could “kill all humans” in the next decade was greater than 10 per cent.
That has focused minds somewhat. But there is still a gap between what most of us see of AI in our day-to-day lives and what it is truly capable of. That gap should worry us.
The biggest mistake is to assume that if we don’t understand exactly how AI works, we don’t need to worry about it. Most of us couldn’t explain how a nuclear reactor works, but that would not stop us listening if experts told us a meltdown was imminent. So why, when some of the creators of AI warn it could fundamentally reshape society, do we often dismiss them?
Perhaps because AI has arrived not with a bang, but insidiously. There is no army of humanoid robots marching through our streets – yet. Instead, it has quietly slipped into our routines. Many of us have barely noticed.
In a matter of weeks, my partner and I realised we have used AI to help navigate the Kafkaesque process of applying for an Italian passport, plan a detailed house renovation, organise a major event, draft a complaint letter, explore the introducion of air conditioning into our home, and design next year’s garden. At work, I use AI to help plan lessons and develop ideas. My partner uses it to create prioritised to-do lists based on the flood of emails that arrive daily.
Barely a year ago, the idea of having an intelligent assistant provide help would have seemed extraordinary to me. The remarkable thing is not that AI can do this, but how quickly we have accepted that it can. Technological revolutions usually happen gradually.
Of course, some people want nothing to do with AI. In schools, the debate is fierce. Teachers wrestle with whether AI is a powerful learning tool or a threat to creativity and critical thinking. And there are serious environmental side-effects from the enormous amounts of power and water AI data centres need to run.
Those debates should not distract us from the bigger question. Most of us cannot grasp the speed or scale of what is happening. However, worried former employees of AI companies have warned that the race to build ever more powerful systems is moving faster than our ability to understand and control the consequences. These are the very people who helped build AI.
Even while arguing AI will bring enormous benefits, OpenAI founder Sam Altman has acknowledged the need for safeguards and Elon Musk has repeatedly warned of serious risks from advanced AI.
It is too easy to dismiss warnings because of who delivers them. When Reform UK donor Christopher Harborne argues that governments needed to take AI more seriously, for instance, some reject the message because of the messenger.
But that’s dangerous. You do not have to agree with someone’s politics to recognise that they may be right about one issue. Hopefully, the warnings will prove exaggerated. But when the people designing these systems tell us that AI could threaten our daily existence, we should listen, not laugh.
So, where should most ordinary people be on the subject? For my partner and I, we are happy to embrace the incredibly helpful advantages AI can provide, whilst mindful of the environmental threat it poses. Selfishly, I don’t think that threat will stop me using it. And I can’t do anything about the existential threat it might represent. So I will continue to embrace its positive applications.
The greatest danger may not be that AI changes our world too quickly; it may be that we realise too late that it already has.
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