I remember driving through traffic last night on I-90, entering Boston, when Tristan Harris, former Google design ethicist, warned on The Diary of a CEO podcast that AI is becoming an existential threat. He compared its scale to nuclear weapons and to the ozone-depleting refrigerants that 197 countries agreed to phase out in 1987, in an act of near-universal coordination.

I remember thinking that his point was not to abandon AI, but to wrestle with the ethical complexity in public: to name its pace, its power, and its incentives, and to decide what we are willing to permit before the defaults become impossible to reverse.

And I remember the sharper insight: AI is inviting, even demanding, that we get clearer about what we value in humanity: dignity, creativity, soul, connection. Not as slogans, but as values we mean to protect.

I remember the pit in my stomach as I listened to Harris enumerate the risks and ethical questions we keep postponing: democratic erosion, economic upheaval, weaponisation. If displacement reaches into the billions worldwide, across professions (surgeons, lawyers, AI programmers) and sectors (customer service, machinists, long-haul truck drivers), who supports the transition? Who funds universal basic income (UBI) globally? What happens to democracy as power concentrates still further, not only in wealth but in access to computation, data, and influence?

I remember asking myself about my complicity: a wilful fogginess about AI’s economic trajectory; a reluctance to sit with entangled dilemmas; a desire to reduce it to a comforting binary, AI is good or AI is bad, so I can stop thinking.

I remember, too, how easily the nervous system reaches for closure under pressure. The exponential growth of AI demands a different capacity: the ability to hold ambiguity and paradox without rushing to certainty; to regulate myself long enough to see multiple perspectives at once; to stay in the conversation, when the answers are not obvious.

I remember wondering whether the sudden rise of New York City’s mayor-elect, Zohran Mamdani, reflects something adjacent to this: a broader hunger for community in anxious times, and a quiet recognition that no individual can go it alone.

I remember reversing my car into my garage space and asking myself what, precisely, I am refusing to know and to face.

I remember asking myself how comfortable I am engaging in AI ethics when I don’t know the answers, yet I can see some of the risks: ubiquitous surveillance, automated misinformation, and the concentration of compute, data, and wealth in very few hands.