I don’t know what to think about AI at the moment. I listen to far too many podcasts from so-called experts who are suggesting negative outcomes regardless of what happens. The problem is that it’s hard to see it any other way.

We have been here before many times: the dot-com boom, the 2008 crash, and so on. There is, however, a bright side to all of this. In those previous events, no one predicted them. Everyone jumped on the bandwagon, invested huge amounts of money, and never thought about the future. This time, however, people are sounding the alarm and trying to learn from failures of the past.

Does this mean we will get it right this time, or does it mean that our predictions are wrong and that something much better or worse could happen? Who knows?

Part of me is excited by AI and the possibilities. Why would I not be? It’s new. It’s completely new. In a world where the massive jump in tech is starting to feel just a little bit generic, it is nice to see things move forward.

The problem comes in that we don’t know what the endgame is here, but I guess we didn’t foretell that social networks could be so damaging. We didn’t know that BlackBerry’s could cause so much stress back in the day. We never know what’s going to come. That’s what makes it exciting.

Does excitement, however, mean investments of trillions of dollars into the unknown? It’s like a bunch of teenage boys trying to win a race where they don’t know what the finish line is or where it is even.

The main worry I see is that you have a few very, very large AI companies dominating this space. They can’t all win, and yet billions and billions of dollars have been invested into each of them. If only one or two win and four or five fall by the wayside, that’s a crash. They simply cannot all win in a race because that’s the definition of what a race is. Someone has to win.

So someone will eventually win this race, and this is where it gets extremely hard to know what will happen next. We know that millions of jobs will be lost, but I think the real issue is that we cannot predict what these jobs will be replaced with. People seem to think that the ones who will do well are the people who can work with AI and who can somehow act as a middle person between AI and humans. The people who would have that skill would likely be 5%, at most 10% of the population. What happens to the rest?

Do we look at universal basic income? At what point do so many people lose their purpose? What’s the point in waking up every day if you’re just given an income that effectively allows you to live and do nothing more?

Where will the incentive to work hard to buy a house be, or to buy a bigger house, or to have children, or even to have relationships if you’re young and not working (and thus not getting the social skills or the opportunity to meet new people whom you could have a relationship with)?

It’s quite a depressing scenario I’m building here, but I’m really struggling to think of the overall positives AI can bring.

We hear lots of talk about medical advances, potential vaccines, and all of the things AI could do that could fall under the banner of progress. That’s all well and good, but we are human beings, and progress needs to occur on a human time frame.

When we see progress leap quickly ahead, think of the internet and social media, we also see a lot of downsides to that. It just moves too quickly for us to contend with and for us to manage it in a way that doesn’t cause social and mental issues. AI potentially will move much, much quicker than we have seen before, and a lot of what we need today could disappear very quickly. That is the biggest worry of all in my mind.

You may sit and think that I’m okay. I’m in a manual job, and I won’t be affected. People historically think of programmers, people who deal with admin in offices, effectively people who work on computers, and they believe that they will be affected the most. That’s true, but that’s only now. We are seeing people who work in the legal profession lose their jobs. We’re seeing programmers lose their jobs. That’s already happening, and that’s what a lot of people are limiting their thoughts of the future on.

However, how long is it going to take for AI-built robots to appear? How long is it going to take for warehouses to be full of robots that are so much more dexterous and intelligent than we have seen before? Potentially, we could see that in many, many manual industries: building houses, roadworks, plumbing, and even walking into a shop and being surrounded by robotic retail staff.

I’m not being ridiculous when I say that this feels easily possible within a decade. If you look at where AI was in January of 2026, and we are now in August, and look at where it is already, it’s frightening how much more it can do now than it could barely six months ago.

We are scared of change as a race. We always have been, there are stories of the world being scared of the bicycle and scared of umbrellas even.

We have always viewed change in a negative way, whether it’s the television, radio, or recorded music. Historically, as humans, we do not like new things. The newest and biggest thing of all is AI and to say it shouldn’t unnerve you would be to just hide yourself in a box and to completely ignore what’s coming. I can’t even say you should be prepared because that’s the issue. You can’t be prepared for something this big and for something that’s powered by such powerful people who really do not have the best intentions outside of making themselves rich and more powerful.

Even if we ignore the size of the change AI will bring and the people who are currently defining the path that it’s going to take, the main issue (in comparison to the industrial age, the internet age, and many other big shifts we have seen) is that we really do not know what AI will look like in a decade. We cannot define it. We cannot envisage just how much it could change our lives. We simply do not know, and that above anything else, is the scariest part.

You may say I am just being pessimistic and that I don’t like change and that I’m fearful of something I do not know, but in the face of something this life-changing, world-changing in fact, I think those are the traits that we all need to have.

At the moment, we have a few select people defining what the future will be and what AI can do at this moment, and that is surely the most dangerous position to be in. I’m not saying we should rise up against AI. There are fundamental benefits to it, but no matter how hard I think of the positives, I really am struggling to dispel the notion that this really could change everything for us and not in a good way.

How about you? What are your feelings on what AI will bring?

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