Progress without Purpose
By Henry RischGrowing up, I encountered artificial intelligence only in movies. The formula was always the same. Humanity builds a machine smarter than itself, and the machine turns on its creators; self-destruction is rooted in our own ambition. We are, of course, nowhere near that kind of destruction, but I have come to believe those films were asking the right question, even if they got the details wrong. They asked what happens when we build something faster than we can understand it. Watching the pace of AI development today, I am not sure we are close to an answer, or that we have even started asking the question. That, more than any science-fiction scenario, is why my perspective on AI is largely one of fear.
My fear is not of the technology itself. It is about the speed at which it is moving and how little time we are giving ourselves to think along the way. New models, new capabilities, and new applications arrive faster than institutions, laws, or even our own habits can adapt. When change outpaces reflection, control quietly slips away. It does not happen in a dramatic moment or anything of that nature, but in a thousand small decisions made under pressure to keep up. Companies deploy because their competitors deploy. Schools and workplaces adopt because everyone else has. Of course, this is all due to their own fears, fears rooted in worries of wealth and power, not so much in humanity and overall well-being.
Some leaders in AI are even beginning to question the speed of this race. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, for example, called for "pacing the frontier," arguing that AI development could outrun our ability to understand and control it and that development should slow enough for safety measures to catch up. Yet even this debate largely assumes that increasingly powerful AI is in the very near future (and maybe even our destination). This is where the disagreement comes in, as it makes us question how quickly and safely we should get there, rather than whether that destination is the one we should even be pursuing in the first place.
That distinction gets at the question I keep returning to: what are we actually trying to do here? What is the end goal beyond making these systems smarter and more capable? The pressure pushing in the opposite direction became especially clear when President Trump rejected calls to slow AI development, arguing that the United States must maintain its advantage over China and declaring that "whoever wins AI, wins." With this framing, it makes the race itself the objective, with technological leadership serving as its own justification.
I wish we would slow down long enough to ground ourselves in a different question: what kind of future are we actually trying to create, and where does AI fit within it? Progress without purpose is not really progress. It is just momentum, and momentum, by definition, is not something anyone is steering.
This sort of fear becomes concrete when I think about my own future. I have always looked forward to what comes next, and the future used to feel like a vision of open opportunities. But as I close in on my final years of college, preparing to enter the workforce as a newcomer, those opportunities feel like they are narrowing. Entry-level positions have traditionally been the starting point of a career, yet they are among the first roles AI is positioned to absorb, and hiring in those roles appears to be shrinking. Meanwhile, graduates carry historic levels of debt, the cost of living keeps climbing, and yet the economy, on the surface, is described as thriving. The disconnect is hard to ignore, and it leaves my generation facing a pair of possibilities. Either AI genuinely is replacing the jobs we were preparing for, or the boom surrounding it is inflated and will eventually correct, taking parts of the economy down with it. In either case, the people entering the workforce lose. We are asked to invest many years and tens of thousands of dollars into preparing for a labor market that may not value newcomers by the time we arrive.
I want to be clear, though, that this is not an argument against AI. The technology holds real promise, and I do not think fear should mean complete rejection. The author Joanna Maciejewska put it well: "I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes." Her point captures a fear I share: that we will hand over the meaningful parts of our lives while keeping the chores. But that fear can be useful when it prompts caution, and caution is exactly what feels missing. The question of AI's ethics is mostly about what these systems can do, but it should shift to include asking who bears the cost of our hurry. Right now, in the context of the labor market, that cost is falling disproportionately on the people with the least say in the matter: students, new graduates, and entry-level workers standing at the door of an economy being redesigned without us.
So my perspective is fear, but it is a fear with a request attached: slow down. Take the time to ask what we are trying to build and who it is for. The movies I grew up on imagined AI destroying us through violence. I suspect the real risk is simpler. We may move so fast that we never stop to decide where we are going and only realize it once we have arrived somewhere that was chosen for us, not by us.