Why AI makes us uneasy: The over-smart chap in the room has turned up, and humans are no longer the smartest in the class

Smartness has always left the mob intimidated and impressed at the same time. Thus the judgmental term 'smart-ass'. Today's over-smart chap in the room is AI. Exceptional intelligence produces something unsettling: suspicion that while you are talking, somebody's already three thought processes ahead.

Nobody particularly wants this sort fired. But nobody wants to sit beside him either. AI has now become this 'smarty-pants' raised to planetary scale. Hence the curious cocktail of awe, excitement, gush, paranoia and fear around it.

This explains why our response to AI has quickly jumped from 'This thing is remarkably clever, I want to be its BFF' to 'This thing will destroy civilisation next Tuesday'. No one seems to worry that the stupid will destroy civilisation. Although a peek through an Oval Office window suggests it deserves monitoring.


The deeper discomfort is status. Humans have spent millennia congratulating themselves on being Earth's smartest species. Intelligence was our private club, and we owned the premises.

Now, something has appeared at the door carrying no schoolbag, requesting no salary, and apparently knowing calculus and Dhammapada. Perhaps AI will transform civilisation. Perhaps it'll disappoint spectacularly. But it has committed the oldest social offence: it's made the rest of us in the class feel a little thick.