Will AI change our world more profoundly than fire? That was the claim made by the head of Google in a recent television interview. Some believe we should be deeply worried by what he said.

Many of the spectators agreed. Go is complicated - there are more possible board positions than molecules in the universe. Developing a computer to play the board game has been called the Holy Grail of AI. But the fans were in for a shock: Lee won only one of the five games. "I apologise for being unable to satisfy a lot of people's expectations," he said. "I kind of felt powerless."

The moral, concluded Christopher Moyer in The Atlantic, was not just that AI could master any board game. More importantly, "The ways in which we might apply these revolutionary advances in machine learning - in machines' ability to mimic human creativity and intuition - are virtually endless."

That was in 2016. Since then, AI has continued to develop in leaps and bounds.

One of those alarmed by its progress is the journalist Amol Rajan. Over the next 25 years, he believes, AI and quantum computing will change our lives "in ways that are impossible to contemplate, let alone grasp".

This was his conclusion after interviewing Sundar PichaiFrom Tamil Nadu in India, the Google CEO started his career as a materials engineer., the head of Google. Artificial Intelligence, Pichai argued, is "the most profound technology that humanity will ever develop and work on". And its capabilities are going to increase at an ever-greater speed: a quantum computer has already done a calculation that would take an ordinary computer 10,000 years.

"We are living through one of history's hinge moments," Rajan writes "an epochA particular time period.  shift, when an old world crumbles, and a new one struggles to be born."

There are three factors, he believes, in this fundamental change: the shift of influence from the West to Asia; climate change; and "incessantSomething harmful or annoying that never seems to stop. technological revolution".

Disputing computing

Rajan calls this phase the Great Acceleration. In it, he says, "the very essence of what it is to be human is being updated and, to my mind, undermined... we have all been hacked by computers who threaten to know us better than ourselves."

He acknowledges that AI could have huge benefits, particularly in medicine. The worry is that computers might learn so quickly that they become autonomousHaving the freedom to control itself or its life.  and start treating humans as their slaves instead of their masters.

To prevent this, we need laws - but at present, legal systems are not geared to the problems raised by new technology.

One example is a recent case against Facebook in America. Almost every US state wanted to curb the tech company's power, arguing that it has a monopoly. But the judge noted that in existing law, monopoly means "the power to profitably raise prices or exclude competition" - and since Facebook is free, and other websites are available, this does not apply to it. 

Will AI change our world more profoundly than fire?

Some say that Amol Rajan's points are spot on. The pandemic marks a turning point in human history, with three huge currents coming together: Easternisation, climate crisis and the tech revolution. The greatest split in the world today is not left v right but fast v slow, and underlying it all is the growth of AI. By altering the way we think and behave, it is changing us more than fire ever did.

Others point out that AI is mainly being developed by businesses driven by profit. That may be a very powerful force, but it is hardly comparable with fire - the stuff of life itself. Without it to cook on and provide warmth, we would never have become as physically developed as we are; and without it to fashion metal and glass, our technology would still be hopelessly primitive.