AI, Human Angst and the Uncomfortable Future

This year, artificial intelligence seems to have crossed an important threshold. Not because machines have suddenly become conscious, taken control of the world or fulfilled any of the more dramatic predictions that have surrounded AI for decades. Something rather more practical has happened.

It has become genuinely useful.

The latest generation of AI models can produce reports that previously took days, analyse complex datasets, compare competing arguments, build strategies, create business plans, interrogate documents and write software. Increasingly, they can also build the website, prototype the application or create the tool required to put an idea into practice.

That change has taken a lot of people by surprise, including me.

For years, AI was something that could be demonstrated. Now it is something that can be deployed.

And that is where the angst begins.

There is a substantial group of people who remain deeply unconvinced. AI is coming for our jobs. AI is consuming too much electricity. Data centres are taking over our towns. AI is stealing the work of artists. AI is filling the internet with synthetic rubbish. AI-generated writing is “slop”. AI-generated imagery is fake. AI-generated music is soulless.

Some of those concerns are perfectly legitimate. Others are exaggerated. Most contain at least a grain of truth.

But beneath many of them sits something much older and much more human: discomfort with technological change.

We have been here before.

Industrial machinery threatened craftsmen. Trains were considered dangerous. Recorded music supposedly threatened live musicians. Television was going to destroy cinema. Home video was going to destroy television. The internet was going to destroy newspapers. Smartphones were going to destroy conversation.

Social media then became the great technological villain of the early twenty-first century. For years it has been blamed, with varying degrees of justification, for political polarisation, declining attention spans, misinformation, loneliness, addiction and the general deterioration of civilisation.

AI appears to be inheriting the job.

It has become the new technological football to be kicked around whenever we need something tangible to blame for our anxiety about the future.

The difference is that AI is moving extraordinarily quickly.

A year or two ago, many executives could still dismiss generative AI as an interesting experiment. Today, almost every large organisation is trying to work out what to do with it.

And they have a problem.

Every major company is simultaneously frightened of AI and frightened of not using AI.

Boards worry about security, regulation, intellectual property, accuracy and reputational risk. At exactly the same time, they worry that competitors may discover how to use AI faster and better than they do.

Somewhere inside almost every large organisation there are now teams hunting for the opportunities.

Can AI replace an expensive software product? Can it automate a cumbersome process? Can it improve customer service? Can it accelerate analysis? Can it reduce administration? Can it allow ten people to do the work that previously required twenty?

The language will usually be productivity, efficiency and transformation.

The economic consequence may ultimately be doing more with the same number of people, or doing the same amount with fewer.

That is the uncomfortable part.

Technology has always changed employment, but AI touches a category of work that many people assumed was relatively protected: knowledge work.

It is not just factory workers watching machines become more capable. Lawyers, programmers, analysts, designers, marketers, accountants, consultants, journalists and managers are discovering that significant parts of their working lives can now be accelerated by software.

That feels different.

When automation happened somewhere else, it was progress.

When it arrives at your own desk, it becomes a social problem.

The creative industries are experiencing exactly the same contradiction.

Film studios, publishers, advertising agencies and music companies can immediately see the economic attraction of AI. Faster production, lower costs, unlimited experimentation and entirely new forms of content are enormously tempting.

But the same companies are also discovering that consumers may care deeply about provenance.

A film company might conclude that it can create scenes more cheaply using AI. A record label might discover it can generate songs without a studio full of musicians. A publisher might decide that synthetic content dramatically increases output.

Then somebody has to persuade the public to buy it.

And the public may not cooperate.

People often value imperfection, authorship and human intent far more than economists expect. We buy paintings partly because someone painted them. We attend theatre because real people are standing on a stage. We listen to musicians because the person behind the music matters.

The technology may be able to reproduce the output without reproducing the meaning.

That distinction could become one of the most important economic questions of the AI age.

There will undoubtedly be mountains of AI slop. The cost of producing average content is heading rapidly towards zero, which means we will produce unimaginably large quantities of average content.

But that does not mean everything produced with AI will be slop.

A bad writer using AI will still produce bad writing. A boring filmmaker with astonishing technology will probably still make a boring film. A company without a good idea will simply produce mediocre material more quickly.

AI does not remove the need for judgement.

If anything, it makes judgement more valuable.

When everybody can generate twenty ideas, the important skill becomes knowing which idea deserves to exist.

When everybody can produce a report, the advantage lies in asking the right question.

When everyone can build a prototype, value moves towards understanding which problems are worth solving.

That is why describing AI simply as a replacement for human beings misses the more interesting transformation.

AI is becoming leverage.

One capable person with powerful AI tools may increasingly achieve what once required a department. A small company may build technology that previously required substantial investment. An entrepreneur can research a market, design a brand, develop a product, build a website and test a business proposition before lunch.

The limiting factor becomes less about technical capability and more about imagination, judgement and ambition.

That is enormously exciting.

It is also profoundly disruptive.

And perhaps that explains much of the current hostility.

The argument about artificial intelligence is partly a debate about technology, but it is also a debate about identity. We have spent generations attaching status and value to particular skills. Suddenly machines are becoming competent at some of them.

Human beings do not particularly enjoy discovering that something they spent twenty years learning can now be performed in twenty seconds.

The temptation is therefore to declare that the machine is cheating.

Perhaps it is.

But history suggests that refusing to use a technology rarely prevents everyone else from adopting it.

The more useful question is what becomes valuable next.

My suspicion is that the winners of the AI era will not necessarily be the people who understand the technology best. They will be those who understand what the technology is good for, where it should be trusted, where it should not, and how to combine machine capability with human judgement.

There will be mistakes. There will be ridiculous applications. There will be regulation. There will be fraud, hype, job disruption, environmental arguments and endless quantities of terrible synthetic content.

There will also be extraordinary businesses, scientific breakthroughs, new creative forms and tools that give individuals capabilities previously available only to large organisations.

Both things can be true.

AI does not need to be either mankind’s salvation or mankind’s destruction.

It may simply be the next immensely powerful technology that forces us to reconsider how we work, what we value and what humans are actually for.

And perhaps that is what is really getting up people’s noses.

The machines are improving very quickly.

Now humans have to decide what to do about it.