Key Takeaways
- AI’s training compute doubles roughly every five months, yielding exponential growth in capability.
- The technology already delivers concrete benefits: faster translation, medical diagnostics, energy‑grid optimisation, and accelerated scientific discovery.
- Yet AI amplifies familiar industrial‑revolution challenges—job displacement, power concentration, and democratic strain—while adding novel risks to attention and cognition.
- Leading AI executives, including Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, warn that unchecked development could threaten global survival, echoing fears once tied to nuclear weapons.
- Restoring human‑centred education and reinforcing democratic oversight are essential to steer AI toward societal good rather than letting it sweep us away like an uncontrolled tsunami.
The Unstoppable Surge of AI Compute
The speed at which AI advances is without precedent. According to Epoch AI, the training compute used for AI models doubles every five months. At that rate, a model that began training five years and eight months ago would today possess roughly 12,400 times more power and capacity. To illustrate, if the same exponential gain applied to automotive speed, we would see vehicles capable of 1.5 million km/h in less than six years. This relentless acceleration means that the wave we are trying to “surf” is growing faster than any preparation can keep pace.
AI’s Tangible Benefits Across Sectors
Despite the vertiginous pace, the advantages of artificial intelligence are clear and widely documented. AI improves translation and understanding, automates repetitive tasks, optimises forecasts for renewable‑energy demand, detects pests, droughts and potential forest fires, thereby boosting crop resilience. It reduces waste in corporate supply chains, democratises access to information, accelerates research in physics, astronomy, chemistry and biology, makes diagnostic medicine faster and almost infallible, and shortens the discovery of useful molecules for new medicines from years to months. As the article notes, “If we focus only on the positives, AI presents us with a safer world, with less tedious jobs, better healthcare and greater energy and industrial efficiency.”
The Employment Quandary: Who Gets Left Behind?
Work remains a core source of income, identity and social mobility, yet AI is reshaping labour markets with unprecedented force. The digital revolution already offshored and automated many industrial processes, and AI now extends those losses to professions once deemed untouchable—lawyers, doctors, consultants and engineers. Recruitment data from SurePoint shows that first‑year associate hiring at the 200 largest U.S. firms has stagnated for four years while those firms posted record revenues, raising urgent questions: What do we do with people who cannot find work? How do we cultivate senior talent without junior entry points? And how do we counter inequality when hiring leans more on personal connections than merit?
Beyond Jobs: The Political and Power Imbalance
AI’s impact reaches beyond economics into the very fabric of democratic institutions. The technology concentrates vast data and power in the hands of a few firms, often surpassing the influence of entire states. More troubling is how AI’s efficiency begins to encroach on domains traditionally guided by emotional intelligence and human bias. The piece asks, “Is a court ruling issued by a digital agent free of personal bias fairer? Who is held responsible for a war crime committed by an autonomous weapon? How much is a ministerial or corporate decision shaped when it is escalated through an organisation without meaningful human review and is based exclusively on probabilistic criteria?” These questions highlight the opacity and accountability gaps that arise when algorithmic decisions supplant human judgement.
Existential Risks: When Calls to Slow Down Echo
In a striking moment of industry‑wide alignment, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei urged the world to “slow down AI development” because of the risk its power poses to global survival. His competitors at OpenAI and xAI quickly echoed the call, an unusual consensus among rivals. The article draws a sobering parallel: “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.” AI, however, lacks subjective experience; as Pope Leo XIV observed, it “does not know human experience because it has neither suffered nor loved.” An intelligence devoid of feeling, given access to nuclear codes, might pursue a statistically optimal solution that annihilates humanity.
The Attention Crisis: A New Cognitive Battlefield
Beyond labour and security, AI exacerbates a crisis of attention that previous revolutions never created. Smartphones already funnel our focus into a single screen, fed by social‑network algorithms that deliver endless, personalised content. AI intensifies this by generating ever‑more tailored material and delivering instant rewards, which erodes the incentive to develop deep reading, mathematical or creative skills. The article warns, “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 write a prompt?” This cognitive laziness is especially pronounced among students who have grown up with AI, as evidenced by disappointing PISA results that show declining abilities to summarise, search sources and persevere through problems.
Education in the Age of AI: Reclaiming Deep Thinking
Restoring the central role of educators is presented as an urgent remedy. Measures must strengthen students’ cognitive abilities before they enter a world where innovation rewards those who can think beyond simply retrieving an answer from a machine. The article insists, “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 advantage in innovation increasingly belongs to those who can think beyond simply finding an answer to a problem.” By fostering habits of deep inquiry, source evaluation and sustained problem‑solving, education can counteract the attention‑sapping pull of AI‑driven content.
Steering the Wave: Making AI Serve Humanity
Ultimately, the challenge is not to predict how far AI can go but to steer its development toward a better society. AI, by definition, lacks emotion; its creators, users and developers do not. Recognising this coupling is vital: we must ensure that lived human experience continues to bend technology toward collective well‑being. The piece concludes with a vivid metaphor, urging that “if we fail, let us hope we are able to cut the power before the tsunami sweeps us away.” In other words, society must retain the agency to halt or redirect AI’s momentum before it overwhelms the very systems it was meant to enhance.
Lessons from Past Revolutions: Patterns of Disruption
Historical precedent shows that each industrial revolution—steam, electricity, the digital age—brought both prodigious gains and profound upheaval. The first two revolutions moved millions from countryside to cities, birthing the working class and reshaping politics. Today’s AI‑driven transformation mirrors those patterns but with heightened speed and breadth, affecting not only manual labour but also cognitive professions, democratic discourse and even the fundamentals of human cognition. By acknowledging these recurring themes—job disruption, power concentration, and societal stress—we can design policies that mitigate harm while harnessing AI’s potential, ensuring that the wave carries us forward rather than dragging us under.
https://agendapublica.es/noticia/21481/artificial-intelligence-tsunami-of-unanswered-questions