Dealing with the tsunami of AI and other new tech

Technological acceleration may generate explosive adjustments rather than gradual adaptation. Governments must appoint senior science and technology advisors with a mandate for analysis and forecasting of transformative technologies

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Three years ago, a few months after ChatGPT was released, we wrote in this newspaper suggesting that the G20 charter an international panel on technological change. The purpose would have been to help shepherd humanity through what was already becoming a turbulent period, as advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and biology began to leave laboratories and become powerful forces in human affairs.

average characteristics of birth cohorts shift in systematic ways. Meanwhile, AI is accelerating biological research itself, compressing timelines for discovery and intervention. The convergence of these domains has only begun.

We do not raise these examples to pass moral judgement. As scientists, we recognise that evolution did not stop with the emergence of Homo sapiens, and it will not end with humans as presently constituted. What concerns us is not change per se, but the timescale on which change is occurring. The speed of transition matters.

In our earlier essay, we suggested that the longstanding “human equilibrium” might be ending. Today, that claim appears less speculative. Many of our political, economic, and social arrangements have become metastable. A familiar physical analogy is water heated beyond its boiling point yet remaining liquid — a temporary state that can give way abruptly to steam.

Consider several domains. Large numbers of economic roles rely on cognitive skills within bounded domains of knowledge; in principle, many are automatable. Emerging AI systems embedded in wearable devices could mediate social interaction in ways that fundamentally alter how humans relate to one another, shifting from intuitive engagement to continuous prediction and monitoring of internal states.