The true danger of AI may lie in its reflection of us, warns Anna Goldsworthy

https://theconversation.com/the-true-danger-of-ai-may-lie-in-its-reflection-of-us-warns-anna-goldsworthy-284817

Publish Date: 2026-06-25 19:49:00

“Just as we always suspected”, writes musician and writer Anna Goldsworthy in her new Quarterly Essay on AI, “the god that may destroy us is the god of ourselves.” This sentence captures the core of the essay: a personal meditation on what AI reveals about humanity. She ponders not logic gates or quantum chips, but the technology’s moral, creative and even theological implications.

Goldsworthy skilfully moves between conversations with her AI-literate children and reflects on AI’s existential risks, education, labour, art, loneliness, companionship, corporate power and future. She asks whether humanity is wise enough to live with a technology that amplifies its weaknesses.

Goldsworthy treats AI, by which she largely means generative AI, as a mirror rather than a monster. Her most persuasive insight is that AI is not alien to us. It has learnt from the huge archive of human writings: the useful parts, but also the evasions, fantasies, cruelties and consolations.

Her theological framing works because the “god” in the title is not a deity arriving from elsewhere: it is something we have made and it carries our fingerprints.

Review: Quarterly Essay: The God we Made – The Threat and Promise of Artificial Intelligence by Anna Goldsworthy (Black Inc.)

Technically, some of the timelines Goldsworthy discusses for artificial general intelligence – “a hypothetical AI system whose abilities match those of a human across virtually all cognitive domains” – and artificial superintelligence remain speculative. For example, when Goldsworthy discusses automation, the issue is not really whether machines are conscious, but whether humans may be “relieved of meaningful occupation”. She asks why we should automate reflexively, and whether we truly wish “to be rescued from all process”.