Neither Cassandras nor miracles

Every generation is convinced it is living through the ultimate revolution. And every time, right on cue, the Cassandras arrive. On one side, those who announce the end: work disappearing, skills hollowed out, the world collapsing. On the other, those who announce the miracle: the machine that will do everything, the problem that solves itself, paradise one click away. They look like opposites, but they are in the same trade: they sell a certainty. And beneath the certainty there is almost always someone with an interest in selling it, to frighten you or to delude you, in any case to take you where it suits them.

If we read the newspapers of two centuries ago, we would find the same words. In the early nineteenth century people feared the looms that stole work from craftsmen. At the start of the twentieth, they debated whether electricity in the home would ruin sleep and morals. In the Eighties it was robots emptying the factories; at the end of the Nineties, the Internet wiping out shops, newspapers, even banks. Technology brings change, sometimes extremely significant change, but almost never in a direction that is wholly utopian or equally catastrophic.

With artificial intelligence we are rewriting the script, in both directions. So let’s turn it round. Imagine that AI had always existed: a presence as obvious as electricity, giving its answer to every question straight away. Then imagine that one day someone invents something new and very strange: the pause. The gesture of stopping for a moment before pressing the button and asking yourself “is this really the right question?” and “what am I actually going to do with this answer?”. In a world of instant answers, that pause would be worth its weight in gold, and we would be willing to pay dearly for it, precisely for the decisions that matter.

That is the point. The pause is not an invention waiting to be made: it is something we already have, and that haste pushes us to give up.

AI is powerful, but it is not a button that does everything by itself. It gives answers at lightning speed, sometimes far too hastily. Are we ready to ask the question again, or to ask it better? Can we tell whether to take everything at face value or to choose what we believe is right and fitting? This is where our own touch still counts: experience, sensitivity and judgement. The experience that lets us recognise what resembles something we have already seen. The sensitivity that catches nuances no data can fully describe. The freedom to choose one road over another when there is no perfect answer. That is where we go on giving meaning to information, and that is where, for now at least, no technology can replace us.

AI is not the monster that replaces us, nor is it the genie in the lamp that excuses us from thinking. It is an extraordinary tool. But no tool has ever replaced the ability to tell what is useful from what is merely convenient.

The Cassandras, whatever their colour, ask only one thing of us: that we choose our side, and quickly.

The most revolutionary answer is to refuse to hurry. To stop, to think, to side neither with fear nor with enchantment by default, to look technology in the face, and to take what is really needed, leaving the rest.

Stopping to think is not standing still: it is the only way to move in the right direction.