It's logical for humans to feel anxious about artificial intelligence. After all, the news is constantly reeling off job after job at which the technology seems to outperform us. But humans aren't yet headed for all-out replacement. And if you do suffer from so-called AI anxiety, there are ways to alleviate your fears and even reframe them into a motivating force for good. In one recent example of generative AI's achievements, AI programs outscored the average human in tasks requiring originality, as judged by human reviewers.

This disturbingly real-looking artificial intelligence sci-fi was made a couple of years ago on what looks like a budget of small change tipped out of the film-makers' coin jars. It's getting a release now presumably on account of AI anxiety creeping up the league table of things that keep people awake at night. Like the Nosedive episode of Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror, the premise here is that in an apparently-near future people wear contact lenses that feed them information about the world. Andrew Riddell plays Patrick, who like everyone else wears dazzling blue contact lenses that fill the air around him with holograms. Patrick is an agoraphobic who hasn't left his apartment for over a month; he spends his time playing computer games, going hammer and tongs with 3D zombies.

If artificial intelligence evangelists' predictions pan out, generative AI systems like ChatGPT and DALL-E are set to transform Hollywood by developing and writing scripts for the next hit TV show, "diversifying" casts with AI-generated actors and generating imagery across multiple mediums, practically instantly, for a fraction of the cost of a real, human artist. But how long will it take for the vision to meet reality, and can a select group of companies -- similar to the rise of Facebook and social media -- be trusted to herald the way? Driving much of the current conversation around AI innovation has been OpenAI, an AI research company with both non-profit and for-profit arms. Just four months after the formal launch of OpenAI's chatbot, ChatGPT, industry titans like Bill Gates were ready to hail artificial intelligence as the most revolutionary technology of our time since the advent of cell phones and the internet. Major tech companies like Google and Microsoft have invested hundreds of millions into AI companies, including OpenAI, as executives look to the technology to steward their companies into the future amid an economic downturn that has particularly hit digital native companies hard.

Today's businesses are facing a new kind of problem: they have too much data. It affects large and small businesses alike, from logging a day's worth of receipts in a local café to dealing with millions of customer records in a multi-national enterprise. But while large corporations are using AI to tackle their data overload, many smaller businesses are more reluctant to embrace the technology. It's not as if SMBs don't believe automation can help them. In fact, SMB investment in automation is on the rise, and two in three say it helped increase their productivity during the pandemic.

If there is a technology that has ever divided humans by opinion, race and class is AI. In fact, when artificial intelligence is mentioned you can clearly tell the underlying hostility between employers and employees. One party thinks automation is the way to increase their profit margin, while the other party thinks AI or automation has come to make employers independent, and may not need their services. In the law industry, things could be worse. AI has taken the role of deciding who's on the right and who's on the wrong, but unfortunately, it has already failed the integrity test for being biased.

When the Facebook founder and CEO let it be known recently that the social network was doubling the number of people working on digital security and content review to 20,000, it was easy to interpret the move as a singular act of damage control by a company in deep trouble. But the way Accenture's Paul Daugherty and Jim Wilson look at it, Facebook's hiring spree is reflective of a much bigger trend unfolding across the economy: a boom in jobs meant to ensure that systems of artificial intelligence are in step with legal and regulatory obligations, ethical responsibilities, and community standards. "Facebook is a good example of a company where its technical capabilities got out of ahead of its ethical capabilities," says Wilson, Accenture's managing director of information technology and business research and co-author with Daugherty of the new book Human Machine: Reimagining Work in the Age of AI. "Now they're playing catch-up." Many other companies, Wilson and Daugherty believe, are in the same spot--or will be soon. "We're at a tipping point," says Daugherty, Accenture's chief technology and innovation officer.

When the Facebook founder and CEO let it be known recently that the social network was doubling the number of people working on digital security and content review to 20,000, it was easy to interpret the move as a singular act of damage control by a company in deep trouble. "Facebook is a good example of a company where its technical capabilities got out of ahead of its ethical capabilities," says Wilson, Accenture's managing director of information technology and business research and co-author with Daugherty of the new book Human Machine: Reimagining Work in the Age of AI. "Now they're playing catch-up." Many other companies, Wilson and Daugherty believe, are in the same spot--or will be soon. "We're at a tipping point," says Daugherty, Accenture's chief technology and innovation officer. "There's a new premium on trust that hasn't been there before."

I f anyone can calm fears of a robot apocalypse, it's Kevin Kelly. Over the years -- first as the founding executive editor of Wired, then as the author of books like What Technology Wants and Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World -- he has become one of the 21st century's most prescient theorists not only on the future of technology but also on our constantly evolving relationship with it. In his latest book, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces that Will Shape Our Future, Kelly writes about the unstoppable trends that we often fear when it comes to technological progress. In a recent interview with Slack, he laid out his vision of the future of work and some simple reasons why we may want to reconsider some of our deep-rooted anxieties about it. Why do you think there's such a huge amount of fear around automation and AI?

I f anyone can calm fears of a robot apocalypse, it's Kevin Kelly. Over the years -- first as the founding executive editor of Wired, then as the author of books like What Technology Wants and Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World -- he has become one of the 21st century's most prescient theorists not only on the future of technology but also on our constantly evolving relationship with it. In his latest book, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces that Will Shape Our Future, Kelly writes about the unstoppable trends that we often fear when it comes to technological progress. In a recent interview with Slack, he laid out his vision of the future of work and some simple reasons why we may want to reconsider some of our deep-rooted anxieties about it. Our intelligence is so central to our identity, that when someone suggests that we can synthesize it, and install into other things, it immediately empties us of our identity and we say, "What are we going to do?"