By Emma Brockes
Publication Date: 2026-04-08 13:36:00
A The corollary to the truism “Don’t stress over the little things” is implicit: “Deal with the big things,” but it can be difficult to choose which big things to tackle. For example: Since the 1970s, the world has been worried about inflation and changing geopolitics. The big problem we should have been dealing with was the climate crisis. Last year, “Charlie Kirk” was the top-selling search query on Google in the US, with several terms related to the threat of Donald Trump also popular, although the focus arguably should have been on the threat of AI.
Or as I Googled myself this week after reading Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz’s extremely alarming long article in the New Yorker about the rise of artificial general intelligence: “Will I be a member of the permanent underclass and how can I prevent that from happening?”
I admit: Before I thought about the topic for more than two seconds, my fears about AI were extremely localized. I thought in…