I write about AI for a living. Lately, I don’t know what to tell people

There’s a TV commercial making the rounds that makes me inexplicably happy. Misunderstood by his smart speaker, driven to work by a faceless automated taxi, and served the wrong coffee order by a multi-armed robotic barista, a weary and resigned bank customer breaks into a surprised smile when he’s greeted by — surprise! — a flesh-and-blood human.

Yes, I know, it’s just another bank commercial, but this “Places for People” spot stands in stark contrast to the endless TV ads pushing AI on us as the solution to all our problems, from supercharging business-to-business workflows and populating consumer help desks to sorting email on our Samsung phones and taking Zoom notes for us.

At the same time, we’re now being told that AI may, quite literally, kill us all within the next decade, with the titans of AI furiously penning joint letters about the dangers of rogue and self-improving AI models while calling for a global slowdown in AI development.

OpenAI’s Sam Altman, for one, writes of the need for “a federal framework that sets consistent safety requirements for frontier AI,” while also noting that the “shift to focusing on safe development and evaluation will need new tools,” which sounds suspiciously like more AI.

Meanwhile, Anthropic boss Dario Amodei declared on Sunday the need to “slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models” amid “dramatically faster” over the past several months, not to mention the scary reports of AI agents going rogue.

But neither Altman nor Amodei think stopping AI development is the answer; rather, “pacing” is the operative word, with Amodei raising the spectre of a “Chinese lead in AI” that “would pose grave danger for the United States and the world.” 

China, for its part, has fired back at the AI “pacing” proposals as “fear mongering,” while U.S congressional leaders seem wary of putting the issue on the political table.

In the middle of all this is the rest of us, who’ve had AI suddenly foisted on our lives and told to use it, or face the consequences.

Now, my job at PCWorld is to write tips, reviews, and commentary about the latest and greatest technology. Some of those devices have misbehaved, fallen short of their sales pitches, or flat-out stopped working. 

But never before have I covered tech that is a) suddenly everywhere all at once, in just a matter of a few years, and b) a threat to end our lives, as their very creators have warned. I mean, yes, the iPhone shook the tech landscape like an earthquake almost 20 years ago, but the worst Apple had to answer for was high prices and Antennagate, not the literal end of civilization. 

I feel as helpless as anyone else, and just within the past few weeks, the mantra I’ve been following — “the best way to prepare for AI is to use it” — has started ringing hollow.

What’s the best way forward in the face of the coming AI era? Good question, and I wish I had an answer.

In the meantime, I’m sure many of us feel as lost as the character in that TV ad, surrounded by machines and AI they didn’t ask for, while hoping for human connections that seem increasingly rare.