On Threads, Hank Green said, “AI isn’t scary because of what it’s going to do to humans, it’s scary because of what it’s going to allow humans to do to humans.”

I recently shared in, High versus low trust societies, examples of this with: more sophisticated scams; sensationalized click bait news titles and articles; and clever sales pitches, all ‘enhanced’ and improved by Artificial Intelligence. None of these are things AI is doing to us. All of them are ways AI can be used by people to take advantage of other people.

I quoted Hank’s Thread and said, “It’s just a tool, but so are guns, and look at how well we (miss)manage those!”

Overall I’m excited about how we will use AI to improve what we can do. There are already fields of medicine where AI can do thousands of hours of work in just a few hours. For example, drug discovery, “A multi-institutional team led by Harvard Medical School researchers has launched a platform that aims to optimize AI-driven drug discovery by developing more realistic data sets and higher-fidelity algorithms.”

The true power and potential of AI isn’t what AI can do on its own, it’s what humans and AI can do together.

But I also worry about people using amazing AI tools as weapons. For example, creating viruses or even dirty bombs. These are things that are out of reach for most people now, but AI might make such weapons both more affordable and more available… to anyone and everyone.

All this to say that Hank Green is right. “AI isn’t scary because of what it’s going to do to humans, it’s scary because of what it’s going to allow humans to do to humans.”

We are our own worst enemy.

The true danger and threat of AI isn’t what AI can do on its own, it’s what humans and AI can do together.