Should we worry?



With the emergence of Generative Artificial intelligence, we appear to be entering an epoch-changing moment in human history.  For the first time in our rise from bandy-legged ape to apex entity, we're encountering something we've never seen before: something as smart as ourselves.

It has everyone rattled. It's unsettling to come across something that can outperform us at things we've long considered our special and unique superpowers; the atributes that supposedly elevate us above the rest of creation: our cognitive abilities: creativity, language, the ability to synthesise fresh ideas from stuff we've been taught, remembered, analysed, categorised, retreived and reconfigured. It's getting really, really good at all of those.

Should we worry? As Stephen Hawking pointed out: "The history of advanced races meeting more primitive people on this planet is not very happy, and they were the same species."

Naked Science: Alien Contact, the National Geographic Channel, 2004

This is too important to be left to scientists, politicians and entrepeneurs. Artists need to get involved.