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We’re entering dangerous territory with AI

The AI hype is real. We’re not prepared for what’s next.

Just how much is AI poised to change our world?

Unless you’ve been in hibernation, the flurry of attention surrounding the latest AI models coming out of Silicon Valley has been hard to miss. AI has gone beyond a chatbot merely answering your questions to doing stuff that only human programmers used to be able to do.

But we’ve been through these cycles involving tech before. How can we tell what’s actually real and what’s mere hype?

To answer this question, I invited Kelsey Piper, one of the best reporters on AI out there. Kelsey is a former colleague here at Vox and is now doing great work for The Argument, a Substack-based magazine. Kelsey is an optimist about tech — but clear-eyed about the huge risks from AI. She’s very much a power user, but is realistic about what AI can’t do yet. And she’s been banging the drum about how consequential AI is for years, even before it became such a hot mainstream topic.

Kelsey and I discuss all the reasons why the hype this time is rooted in something real, how we got here, and where we might be headed. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, which drops every Monday and Friday, so listen to and follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What’s actually happening right now in AI?

If you look closely, AI is already a big deal. Not in some abstract future sense, but right now. The closest analogy is not a new app or a new platform. It’s more like discovering a new continent full of people who are very good at doing certain kinds of work.

These systems are not people, but they can do things that used to require people. They can write code, generate text, solve problems, and increasingly do so in ways that are very useful in the real world.

And the key point is that it’s not stopping here. Every year the systems get better. The progress from 2025 to 2026 alone is enough to make it clear that this isn’t a static technology.

Whatever AI can do today, it will be able to do more of it tomorrow and so on.

Why is the reaction so split between panic and dismissal?

The default move is to assume nothing ever really changes.

If you’re a pundit, you can get pretty far by always saying this is hype, this will pass, nothing fundamental is happening. That works........

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