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As AI advances I increasingly feel as if I have woken up in the movie Don’t Look Up: the implications of this stunning technology seem so immense and yet we can muster only a collective shrug. We plough on, heads down, while an “alien intelligence” (as author Yuval Noah Harari describes it) quietly surpasses us.
On a recent Tuesday, I began the day grappling with silicon (I interviewed the godfather of AI Geoffrey Hinton) and ended it in the collective embrace of carbon (I took my 11-year-old daughter to our first gig together).
I’ll draw those two disparate experiences together later, but let’s first consider where we are with AI.
My interview with Hinton – for RNZ’s 30 With Guyon Espiner – isn’t out yet. I’ll limit the spoilers but suffice to say his words were as compelling as they were chilling. He believes AI already has understanding and will one day develop consciousness. Like Bill Gates, he believes it will be able to do most of the jobs humans now do. Oh, and he has a P(doom) of 20: he puts the probability that AI will wipe us out at up to 20%.
This isn’t some guy at the bar sharing his reckons. Hinton won the Nobel Prize in Physics last year for his work on machine learning. He spent 10 years developing AI at Google, leaving in 2023, so he could warn of its dangers. He is so far ahead of the curve he got a PhD in AI from Edinburgh University … in 1978!
AI is an infant (Chat GPT was released in November 2022) but is already smarter than most humans. If it can replace us in the workforce and in the creative arts we consider uniquely human, where does it leave us?
In Don’t Look Up the astronomers warning that a meteor will destroy the planet are largely ignored while the world continues to focus on trivia. I wonder as AI creeps into our daily lives, why aren’t we even having a conversation about how to prepare for the ramifications?
Banning kids from social media feels inconsequential compared with what we should tell them about the world and the jobs they will inherit. Remember when we thought we could future-proof education by teaching kids to code? AI now does 25-30% of coding at Google and Microsoft.
In my own industry, I’m watching the use of AI accelerate. Claude (made by Anthropic) delivers many hours of research in seconds. Otter.ai transcribes long interviews in minutes, providing crisp and concise summaries. News websites you visit every day are using AI to determine prominent stories, outsourcing news judgment – once a key editorial skill – to robots.
Upload a long, complex document to Google’s NotebookLM and it will immediately summarise it, create a timeline, answer any question about it and even create a podcast where two AI hosts banter over the content. The latest text-to-video AI is so sophisticated you have to wonder where it leaves the advertising and film industries, as you type in a prompt and watch your imaginary world rendered in seconds.
I’ve been rewatching the fabulous Miyazaki anime films with my daughter. Each scene is hand-drawn and the characters (a Totoro, a Catbus, a moving castle) are magical, eccentric and strangely wonderful.
With AI you can transform any photo into a Miyazaki-style drawing in seconds – much to the horror of the Studio Ghibli director himself, who said he was “utterly disgusted,” calling it an “insult to life itself”.
Will kids still want to draw cartoons if AI can do this? If AI can write symphonies and poetry, will we leave them to it? I asked Claude to write me a sestina about lost youth and a folk song in the style of Bob Dylan. The results were fairly lame.
But consider this effort by DeepSeek when asked what it means to be an AI in 2025:
Hinton believes that one day AI will be able to create art at the level of a Shakespeare or Picasso. So, my Tuesday morning interview with him left me rattled. It was nice to focus on something else that night, as my 11-year-old got dressed up for our first concert together: American singer Gracie Abrams.
Spark Arena was full of tweens and teenage girls. Out came Gracie Abrams: smart, strong, beautiful and talented. The audience worshipped her, singing (and screaming) the lyrics back at her for two hours.
My daughter leaned her head on my shoulder at one point and grabbed my arm and held it tight. I can still feel that touch. That is something AI cannot do better than me: be a loving father and feel a sense of collective human joy.
Silicon can’t do that. Carbon can. Maybe as we consider our future with AI we need to start with that.
Guyon Espiner is an investigative journalist and presenter at RNZ. He hosts the TV and radio interview show 30 With Guyon Espiner.
