We're not about to awaken an evil digital god — AI is far more likely to end in a great disappointment

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Artificial intelligence (AI) terrifies us partly because it is new and partly because it is disturbingly familiar. We have invented machines that converse, flatter, argue and improvise with uncanny fluency. Confronted by this synthetic reflection, we behave like early humans seeing a mirror for the first time: We project consciousness behind the glass, then populate it with our expected behaviors, emotions, hopes and nightmares. In other words, we scare ourselves.

Today's frontier models are impressively good at writing, coding and math . Yet they still fail at ingredients of useful artificial general intelligence (AGI), a system that matches or surpasses human capabilities such as consistent reasoning, long-term planning, factual consistency and reliable performance outside their "experience" (the data they were trained on). We are right to worry about the theoretical dangers of artificial superintelligence (ASI) because of the danger that such a system might outwit its human creators and pursue its own ends, potentially at our expense. While some AI executives have asserted that we've reached AGI , these claims are contentious and do not meet more considered definitions of AGI.

It's easy to fear such a potentially advanced technology, but extravagant worst-case scenarios obscure more immediate and important risks. The most likely danger is not a digital god awakening and launching a Hollywood-style war against humanity. After all, AI depends on electricity, cooling, data centers, specialized chips, networks, technicians and sprawling supply chains, all of which are scarce and often fragile. Interrupt the power, restrict the graphics processing units (GPUs) used to train them, disable the cooling or disconnect the network, and in most scenarios, the supposedly omnipotent machine that's out to kill humanity stops.

Andrew's experience spans over 30 years in industry, government and academia. Originally a physicist at the Rutherford Appleton Lab, Andrew joined Logica at the height of the early AI boom in the early 90s and has subsequently held high-level positions for Esys, Qinetiq, and CGI UK, as well as serving a secondment with the U.K.'s Cabinet Office. Andrew later joined Roke Manor Research as head of research and development, returning to academia to help set up the University of Surrey’s Institute of People-Centred Artificial Intelligence.

A genuine ASI might recognize this as an obvious fact; it is codependent on humanity, at least for the foreseeable future. A true intelligence capable of understanding the world better than we do might know that destroying its own industrial support system would be self-defeating.

A true intelligence might also recognize that its understanding of the physical world is limited and secondhand ‪—‬ accessible to it only by virtue of the texts, videos and audio feeds it can access. It lacks that crucial element of being embodied in the world — understanding how gravity behaves, what weather feels like, how objects interact, and so on. A true intelligence might realize this, see the limitations of its experience and, therefore, tread with caution. A true intelligence might be completely different from human intelligence, having other strengths, weaknesses, approaches, and even ethics. For example, consider that an AI intelligence can copy itself, running as myriad instances, communicating as a "hive mind" — a very different kind of intelligence. But I speculate.

What I can say is that the systems that should worry us most are not necessarily the smartest ones but rather the incomplete intelligences acting on narrow objectives, given agency and offered access to critical infrastructure . These systems may accidentally harm us simply because they don't know any better. For example, there is a thought experiment created by Nick Bostrom , known as the " paper clip problem ," where an AI pursues its objectives of making as many paper clips as it can, but it then achieves that aim at the expense of the Earth and humanity which all get converted to paperclips in the pursuit of the AI’s narrow goals.