Every time an exciting new technology appears the world seems to divide into two camps:

1. It’s going to destroy us all/take away our jobs/ ruin family life etc.
2. It’s amazing and will transform the world.
3. “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn”.

We are in that state with AI, the “destroy us” camp are trying to slow it down, the “amazing” camp are rushing ahead, and the rest of the world gets on with trying to earn a living.

The reality is that the truth lies somewhere in between.  AI is over-hyped, nothing like as intelligent as we like to think, and is being attributed with human qualities because it appears to “think” and therefore must be human. Robots are given male or female names depending on the work they do and the characteristics they demonstrate, when in fact they are genderless. Where AI is currently very good is at managing and interrogating vast data sets at warp speed and is already doing a lot of rather dull tasks done in the past by slow humans.

It will replace a lot of jobs, in the same way that weaving machines in the homes were replaced by the machines in factories because they were faster.  The horse and cart went the same way.  There were lots of Luddites who fought for the old ways. Good and bad employers adopted new technologies with some terrible, often fatal consequences, to the home workers and the carters, and all the others caught in new technologies' web.

But life moved on, and we learned to live with the consequences. Over time new, and undreamt of, jobs appeared.

We are at this point with AI – there will be consequences for those whose jobs are replaced.  They will not be good in the short to medium term, and we need to try to mitigate the suffering.  Good and bad actors will adopt AI and there will be unforeseen results,  as there have been with nuclear technology – where the world has never managed to ban something that could destroy most of humanity.

But history teaches that there is no going back.