This AND That
There is a false choice in how we live with technology that is driving a lot of anxiety.
I’ve just finished watching the film ‘The AI Doc’ on Netflix (IMDB ). It is a solid attempt to try and help the average viewer to understand the forces at play in the world of AI. Predictably, it covers the negatives and the positives before trying to rationalise what our responsibilities are. At the end, it asks the viewer to support international co-operation and to take personal responsibility for what happens next. I went through an almost identical path over the course of a year in 2025 and 2026. I can fully sympathise with both of the pessimism and the optimism equally. While I’m sure that my assumptions and thoughts, dreams and desires will change, I feel like I have arrived at a balance that allows me to live and work amidst all of the emerging disruption.
There is one glaring omission in this documentary and in the wider debate about our future technologies. The current news reporting and debate all present AI as fait accompli. I’m not suggesting that there is a future scenario where we don’t have AI. I think it’s reasonable to assume by this point that artificial intelligence will be a part of our everyday lives. How we interact with it, what is and isn’t AI, how we manage the ethics of a non-human intelligence - these are all details that we are struggling to work out today, and I’m sure the struggle will continue into the future for a while yet.
The omission I’m referring to here is more about personal choice. Let’s imagine a ‘future world’ scenario where AI has developed into something akin to artificial superintelligence, or at a minimum, artificial general intelligence. In other words, it is embedded in everyday life to the maximum extent possible. The horror in such a scenario is never being able to escape it, and I would love for the debate that we are currently in about governance and co-operation to widen and cover this very real requirement.
Consider the example of a young person at the start of their adult life wanting to embrace a lifestyle and a career outside of technology and AI. Consider an adult with a family who works with AI in their career, but then chooses not to work with AI in their personal life in the evenings or at weekends. Or perhaps a couple in their later years who benefit from AI in their day-to-day, but wish to ‘check out’ for six months and avoid AI and technology over an extended summer adventure. Mobile phones have given us a clear warning that convenience leads to dependency. How will we learn that lesson when it comes to AI?
I honestly believe there is nothing anti-technology or anti-AI about suggesting that each individual can have the personal choice to engage or not engage. Neither do I think that this is some ideology-driven point that a human right of choice needs to be protected. I see this as a practical consideration about how to manage the choices of a global population and avoid the tyranny of ‘all or nothing’. The incentives of the technology industry are to chase the profit opportunity present in having AI layered thick over everything. The media has latched on in its reporting without questioning the lessons from the past and the choices that we will probably want to make in the very near future. It is lazy and we need to do better.
AI and technology generally offer us the ability to manage personal choice, and we now need to work hard to protect it. In the future, we will all make daily choices and many of them will be run on an operating system of AI. When we choose not to involve technology, we will want the systems, laws, and social norms to accept our choices, and for the individual not to be discriminated against. When we choose to go for a walk, exchange money for goods and services, plan a trip, get advice from a doctor, send a letter - we must be able to do this with or without that technical operating system being in control.
It sounds like a call to stick with the old ways, and I don’t know how to work through that criticism. Today we see the analogue world as being inefficient. And we’re driving ever harder to streamline, optimise, and digitise. Nature and climate continue to remind us that in complex systems you desperately need a level of capacity and resilience. So no, I don’t see this as a call to the old ways, but really a need for us to figure out the new ways. Not one or the other, analogue or digital, AI or not. But rather ‘AND’.
The implications of this are immense and highly complex. I can’t begin to understand them, but I do know that as we start calling for better AI co-operation and governance internationally, the right to choose how each of us engages (or not) is a fundamental requirement of the framework. We need to design that into the AI operating system from the start.