It is difficult to open any newspaper (I know, who still does that anyway?) or consume any news, let alone join any business discussions, without having to talk about AI. The topic does not go away, though within this broad topic there are so many layers and subthemes and messages that it rarely gets boring, anyway.

As Garrison Lovely noted in his brilliant book, Obsolete, people tend to fall into three categories when it comes to AI attitudes. There are the accelerators, who are basically in the utopian camp and accordingly convinced that artificial intelligence will solve all of our problems, so we cannot go fast enough in our efforts to accelerate and evolve AI. At the opposite extreme, we can find the worriers, who think AI-induced human extinction is looming and even if not, there’s a strong chance that AI will have devastating effects on work and life. And then you have the critics who are broadly skeptical about most popular claims about AI, whether positive or negative, and perhaps most controversially believe that AI is simply overrated.

Since nobody has data on the future, we will avoid picking camps here—time will tell, and by “time” we should really mean the next two or three decades rather than 2027 or 2028. Indeed, obsessing over the future can be an unhealthy strategy for not dealing with present problems and concerns, including how to remain relevant in an age in which AI is unquestionably performing a large number of “knowledge economy” tasks that were hitherto the exclusive remit of human intelligence.

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