Could AI be as transformative as the emergence of agriculture?

The biggest risk of artificial intelligence is that we sleepwalk into a 'new normal' that benefits the system more than the people living inside it

At last year’s Law Society massive open online course on AI, one expert compared AI’s impact not just to the internet or even the printing press but to the shift from hunter gathering to agriculture. Picture: iStock

A of mine in his late 50s writes code for a small financial firm in Ireland. The company handles reporting work for very large US financial institutions.

He’s good at his job, likes his colleagues, and had assumed he would keep going until retirement. Now he’s being told that, unless the firm expands quickly, his role could be made redundant as software and AI take over more of the routine work.