It is impossible to ride out a tsunami. You may have trained extensively, own the finest board available, and studied the wave’s shape as much as you deem necessary, but the truth remains: once you stand up on it, the consequences are unpredictable. That is precisely where humanity finds itself today with artificial intelligence: about to surf a wave whose crest appears endless.
The pace at which this technology advances is extraordinary. According to Epoch AI, the training compute powering AI models doubles every five months. If this continues, a model that began training five years and eight months ago would today possess roughly 12,400 times more power and capacity. If the same tempo were applied to vehicle speed, it would amount to developing, in under six years, machines capable of traveling at 1.5 million km/h.
Yet accelerating faster does not automatically translate into arriving sooner or in better shape. The impact of AI and its applications on our world is enormous. We are no longer asking whether this technology will revolutionize everything, because it is already evident that it is. The real question is whether that transformation will be complete, and whether we will be able to adapt our economy, our work model, our education system, our democratic institutions and, ultimately, our societies. Most of all, whether we will manage to do so before the train goes off the rails.
“We are no longer asking whether this new technology will revolutionise everything, because it is already obvious that it is doing so. The question is whether that transformation will be total”
In any case, it is important not to yield to doom-laden tendencies and apocalyptic forecasts. The benefits of artificial intelligence are clear. AI enhances our capacity for translation and comprehension, automates repetitive tasks, optimizes forecasts for renewable energy demand, detects pests, droughts and potential forest fires, strengthening crop resilience, reduces waste in corporate supply chains, democratises access to information as never before, accelerates research in physics, astronomy, chemistry and biology, makes diagnostic medicine more accurate and faster—almost infallible—and shortens the time needed to discover useful molecules for new medicines from years to months.
If we focus only on the positives, AI offers a safer world, with fewer tedious jobs, improved healthcare and greater energy and industrial efficiency. Yet every coin has two faces. Humanity is once again confronting three challenges that previous industrial revolutions also posed, this time with even greater force: an employment crisis —which inevitably signals deep social change—, a crisis of political systems and, ultimately, the risk of self-destruction. Moreover, this new technology has accelerated a crisis that humans had never faced before: a profound disruption in our ability to pay attention. Our cognitive capacity, one of humanity’s defining traits compared with other species, is being weakened and dispersed by competition from other forms of intelligence. This may not be the moment for Ludditism, but the force of the wave requires that all these threats be carefully assessed.
First, we must address employment. Work is not only people’s main source of income; it is also one of the central pillars of their identity and the single most important factor explaining social and geographical mobility. The first two industrial revolutions employed millions of Europeans, drawing them from rural areas to cities and forging a new social class—the working class—that shaped politics at the end of the 19th century and throughout the 20th.
Today, the trend is moving in the opposite direction. The digital revolution at the start of this century automated many industrial processes and contributed to offshoring. Numerous European regions have been striving to adapt for years.
“This new technology has accelerated a crisis that humans had never experienced before: a profound crisis in our capacity to pay attention”
The emergence of AI has not only hastened these job losses, but extended them to segments of society that had once believed themselves untouchable. Lawyers, doctors, consultants and engineers watch with concern as more of their tasks are automated or replaced. Their bosses still provide added value that is difficult to replace: coordinating, negotiating, taking risks and building relationships. But the automation of producing and reviewing reports, as well as executing repetitive processes, is leaving many people behind.
The first dismissal is the hire that never happens. According to SurePoint, the recruitment of first-year associates at the 200 largest firms in the U.S. has remained virtually stagnant for four years, even as those same firms report record revenues over the same period. This raises three major questions: what do we do with people who cannot find work? How do we produce senior professionals if they never had the chance to start as juniors? And how do we address the inequality produced by a world where recruitment will be more closely tied to personal connections than to qualifications? It still seems too early to provide any answers.
Second, AI poses a major challenge to our traditional institutions and their democratic expression. This is not only about the vast concentration of data and power in the hands of the companies that control these systems, which in many cases exceeds that of entire states. The novelty lies in the fact that the efficiency of artificial intelligence is beginning to intrude on the space traditionally occupied by emotional intelligence and decisions shaped by human bias.
“The emergence of AI has accelerated all these job losses and extended them to sections of society that once believed themselves untouchable”
Is a court ruling issued by a digital agent fairer if it is free from personal bias? Who bears responsibility for a war crime committed by an autonomous weapon? How much is a ministerial or corporate decision influenced when it is escalated through an organization without meaningful human review and based solely on probabilistic criteria? Once again, the answers remain unclear, especially when the temptation to gain geopolitical advantage among actors not bound by democratic safeguards undermines everyone else’s capacity to respond.
Third, this month Anthropic’s chief executive Dario Amodei stunned the world by urging that we should “slow down AI development” because of the risk its power poses to global survival. What stood out was how quickly his competitors agreed with him, something unusual among leaders of firms such as OpenAI or xAI.
Do those who understand AI best have reason to fear an apocalypse is near? The truth is that there are ample grounds to be suspicious of them, since an incentive to slow the growth of new competitors and to consolidate their oligopoly could underlie such positions.
“In the past, nuclear weapons could destroy the world, but activating them required action by one or more humans whose own destruction was also guaranteed”
Even so, the degree of autonomy this technology can achieve is terrifying. In the past, nuclear weapons could annihilate the world, but activating them required action by one or more humans whose own destruction was also guaranteed. In the words of Pope Leo XIV, AI does not know human experience because it has neither suffered nor loved. And an intelligence that cannot feel, if granted access to nuclear codes, is incapable of weighing anything beyond statistical criteria when deciding whether to activate them. In such circumstances, perhaps the statistically optimal solution an AI agent might discover to ensure world peace would be to destroy the world. Who can say for sure.
Finally, AI presents a new challenge that neither the steam engine, rural exodus, the railway, nor even the atomic bomb ever created: a profound crisis of attention. It is true that this widespread decline in concentration cannot be attributed solely to AI. The real problem lies with screens.
The ubiquitous use of the smartphone to obtain information, communicate, present ourselves to others, navigate, pay, handle our finances or organise our time concentrates all our attention in a single place. Social networks and their personalised recommendation algorithms are a perpetual party. Who will pay attention to their teacher when everything they care about most is constantly flowing across the screen in the palm of their hand? Why sit on a bench waiting for a friend if a hundred notifications are vying for your attention? And how can one listen to a friend when they arrive if those notifications never stop?
AI accelerates this collapse of attention by generating a greater volume of content, tailored ever more closely to each individual. Its ability to provide solutions and rewards within seconds disrupts the educational process and encourages us to outsource thinking itself. Why develop reading comprehension or mathematical skills if a machine can already do it? Why learn to write or create? Or why solve complex puzzles if it is easier to craft a prompt?
This cognitive laziness is even more evident among those who have known nothing else: students who have grown up with AI, or nearly so, do not remember what it means to summarise, search for sources or spend time finding solutions. The latest PISA results are discouraging. Measures are urgently needed to restore educators to a central role and make students exercise and strengthen their cognitive abilities before entering the real world, where the edge in innovation increasingly belongs to those who can think beyond simply finding an answer to a problem.
“Measures are urgently needed to restore educators to a central role and make students exercise and strengthen their cognitive abilities before entering the real world”
Ultimately, there are many questions and few answers. What seems clear, however, is that humanity’s real challenge should not be to forecast merely how far this technology can go. The real challenge is to steer its development toward a better society. That means positioning AI at the service of humanity and treating it as a tool to make our lives easier.
Artificial intelligence, by definition, cannot be emotional. Yet, by definition, its creators, developers and users cannot escape emotion either. We must understand this clearly, become aware of it and ensure, as we have always done, that lived human experience once again bends technology toward building a better society for everyone. And if we fail, let us hope we can cut the power before the tsunami carries us away.
