How fear could stop us from solving some of the world’s biggest problems

Artificial intelligence is coming to take our jobs – and even our lives, with Rishi Sunak warning this week about the danger of humanity completely losing control of AI. But, asks Andrew Griffin, might our anxiety about the machine age itself be the real threat?

Ai-Da Robot, the world’s first ultra-realistic humanoid robot artist, appears at a photo call in a committee room in the House of Lords in October 2022 (Getty Images)

You could be forgiven for thinking the apocalypse was here already. All summer the headlines came, often looking like the ignored warnings in a disaster film: artificial intelligence is coming for us all, to take our jobs and perhaps even our lives. The suggestion was that AI is both totally powerful and totally evil.

This week, for instance, the prime minister, Rishi Sunak, warned that AI could be used to build chemical weapons or commit crimes, and might even escape human control entirely. He said that the “easy speech” to give would be one pointing to the exciting possibilities of AI. But the risk of an all-powerful, malevolent artificial intelligence was too strong to ignore, he suggested.