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Over my own lifetime, I have seen so much new technology that my father's generation could not have even imagined. The last two hundred years of human history have been shaped above all by industrial and technological progress driven primarily by the West. That progress was built on the exploitation of the raw materials, labor, and land of the East, and together these forces have forever changed the face of the world.

Radio communications, the light bulb, the steam engine, the internet, the mobile phone, industrial automation, digitization, each new technology arrived with the same euphoric promise: that it would make us more connected, improve the human condition, and make people freer. And in many ways, that promise has been kept. Creature comforts, travel, the curing of disease, and instant communication are all real gifts of this progress, and they will continue to serve humanity.

But this rush toward greater comfort, consumerism, and control of the world's resources has also produced a darker legacy. It has deepened polarization in society and accelerated the spread of misinformation. It has driven an unprecedented degradation of the air, water, and soil on which life depends, alongside the rapid depletion of natural resources. It has widened income and wealth inequality, both within and across societies.

And it has enabled the creation of weapons of mass destruction, along with an ever-growing readiness to use them, most often against poorer countries and imagined adversaries, with less and less moral justification beyond power grabs, land grabs, and the humiliation of "others."

It is in this landscape that we now find ourselves facing another technological revolution, that of artificial intelligence (AI), touted as bigger and more impactful than all of the above, since it promises to integrate every prior technology into a human-like agency once available only to humans themselves. This arrives even as colonial imperialism and superpower hegemony have long marginalized vast populations and denied them the benefits of such breathtaking technological change. The same mobile telephony that connected vast swaths of humanity with one another, and gave rise to compulsive social media engagement, is also integral to a surveillance society, one increasingly practiced by democratic and authoritarian countries alike.

Large language models (LLMs), the key building blocks of AI, have progressed more rapidly than any prior technology and can now integrate most current technologies, the internet of things, and human activity itself on a scale unthinkable even a decade ago. AI is poised to take over the bureaucratic functions of human societies, running a factory, supervising a government agency, or analyzing vast swaths of data from disparate sources, with memory, capability, and efficiency that already exceed human agents. It can write computer code, mimic human voices, and generate lifelike video, and before long we will not be able to distinguish who, or what, is truly behind a given piece of data, a voice, or an action. Add to that its capacity to make decisions once reserved for humans, to authorize a payment, drop a bomb, or surveil a person for legal or illegal ends, all before a human agent can intervene, and it becomes clear why we must rethink what exactly we are creating.

The oligarchs driving these innovations are increasingly motivated by greed and profit rather than public interest, and many have already aligned themselves with, or been coerced by, corrupt regimes and administrations. Some have been implicated in serving the interests of those who have committed war crimes, in building surveillance systems over ordinary citizens and employees in democratic nations, and in extending that same surveillance across occupied lands and into global diplomacy.

This is uncharted territory, and it will require the best of us to get ahead of this technology before it pushes all of us into a race to the bottom, one where the only bottom line is profit, where social and political polarization deepens, and where the ethical and moral framework that has sustained humanity since its beginning, however imperfect, is stripped away.

The key question is this: do we have the moral clarity, the social and political will, and the commitment to human agency to meet this new technology on our own terms? AI can undoubtedly enhance human capability and wellbeing. But its potential for serious harm may far outweigh its benefits, especially if we fail to act in time, and that time is fast running out.