In the 1960s society was gripped by the very real fear of the end of humanity due to a new technology – back then it was not AI, but nuclear weapons. (We still live with this threat today, but let’s come back to that another time.) Among the most brilliant artistic responses to this fear was the film “Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” directed by Stanley Kubrick and made in 1964. There’s a lot to learn from watching it if you haven’t already done so (and it’s a lot of fun).

I’m not worried about humanity being wiped out by AI in ten years, or whatever random timescale the next overexcited, overgrown-teenage-coder who leaves Anthropic puts on it, with whatever random “probability” estimate they’ve slapped on for fun.

I am worried about how we are willingly, slowly and surely degrading our own brains. Every time we “just ask AI” instead of taking 10, 30 or 60 seconds to think for ourselves about – well, about anything at all – we let another drop fall on the rock of our consciousness. We won’t notice but in a generation or two it will have eroded.

I am worried about how we have already willingly, slowly and surely sold our attention and our ability to focus for next to nothing, to train models to become better at harvesting our attention, making us give up even more of it. Our brains have been rewired. When did you last read a book? An essay? A newspaper?

It’s not that those slow reading or thinking activities are inherently good and flicking from one 5-second video to another inherently bad. It’s that we are approaching the point where homo sapiens can *only* do the latter and can *no longer* do the former. From the point of view of society as a whole, will it have been worth that price for Google to have created the most profitable business model in history?

Just as with previous technologies, executives are dreaming of doing away with whole teams, whole divisions, just paying a (currently) small monthly subscription to get work done by machines that never sleep. No more HR! Plus, everyone else is doing it, so you don’t want your business to be left behind, left with a lumbering meaty cost base that can no longer compete and a business model that no longer computes.

Never mind who will pay for the goods and services produced by armies of AI agents if no more humans are employed. Picture this promised land of impeccably efficient corporate entities run by autonomous agents. Capital and unimaginable profits flow through them, like a pristine river uninterrupted by the sludge and silage of human labour which will have been dredged out and repurposed as landfill run by another company called, I don’t know, how about “UBI Inc.”

Will this, then, turn out to be a price we thought was worth paying for a 2%, 5% or even 10% boost to GDP, most of which accrues to a handful of people with the rest of humanity hoping to catch a drop of condensation that might trickle down?

We have a choice. We have agency. I’m not worried about AI because it’s not AI that will finish us off. We are more than capable of doing this by ourselves. And the beautiful thing about this agency: it means we can also choose a different outcome. We can harness this incredible tool (yes, I really do love AI) for the good of our species. Nothing is inevitable. We do not have to turn 20th century science fiction or satire into 21st century reality.