I recently watched a clip in which Geoffrey Hinton was asked which single moral rule he would give a superintelligence. His answer was “be kind”, adding that we do not want to share the planet with something more intelligent than us and mean. I can understand the sentiment if it
Today, we wrap up AIES 2026, for which I had the honour of being general co-chair. A great event, with many deep discussions and very active engagd, and seen from my perspective, young participants. Which got me thinking of my first AI conference, in November 1986: the second IFIP
A recent announcement of the European Apply AI summit made me reflect (or rant) again on the Commission's Apply AI Strategy, which soon will turn one year old. I reread the strategy, and one passage got to me again: AI should be considered as a potential solution "
Given the constant focus on the ‘AI doom’ in my social media and in every newspaper I read in the last few weeks, I've been exploring why extinction and rogue-AI stories seem to dominate Western AI coverage, while e.g. Chinese news barely engages with them. My
I am getting very tired of yet another media request to discuss 'AI-escapism'. So here it is: AI does not wake up one morning and decide to escape. Ask an agent to buy you a pizza. It reasons: buy pizza > needs money > bank has money
It has been a crazy two weeks for AI news. Jacob Coxon resigned from Anthropic, saying the people building AI believe it could kill us all by the end of the decade. An Anthropic safety researcher put the chance at more than 10% within ten years. Dario Amodei then asked
In the last few days, several journalists from at least five different countries have asked me about AI "taking control", about the probabilities of AI armageddon that circulate in the press, about the scenarios that could trigger it, and about what we can still do. Below is a
The Scientific Advice Mechanism (SAM) of the European Union has published guidelines on its own use of AI. This is relevant because it shows how an advisory body proposes to apply to itself the kind of standards it is recommending to others. This is rarer than it should be.The
More than 1,300 employees of the frontier AI companies have signed a statement called "Pacing the Frontier". It includes CEOs and chief scientists from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta and others. They ask the United States government to support an international effort to build the technical and
The moment is significant. Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, intervenes at an inflection point where AI systems are being integrated into consequential decision-making processes, in labour markets, public administration, military systems and information ecosystems, before adequate governance frameworks exist. Its grounding in the tradition of
Today I spoke at the ADD Project summit on AI and Democracy. The conversations were rich and at times uncomfortable. Good. That is what democracy requires. Here are some reflections. Technology does not serve people I started my presentation with a paraphrase Bruce Schneier: "If you think technology is
In an earlier blog post, I asked whether the traditional foundations of computing science, algorithms, systems, formal methods, still constitute the core of the discipline or have become its infrastructure. That question is not abstract. It connects directly to what is happening in lecture halls and admissions offices, as seen
A recent piece in Science. "Why I may ‘hire’ AI instead of a graduate student", by Ariel Rosenfeld, a researcher I know well and whose early career enthusiasm and earnestness I remember with real appreciation, contains one sentence that stopped me cold: "The issue is not whether
In the 1630s, the Dutch Republic experienced what is often described as the first recorded speculative bubble: Tulip Mania. Prices for rare tulip bulbs soared to extraordinary levels before collapsing abruptly in 1637. Nearly four centuries later, massive capital flows into AI chips, data centers, and foundation models raise a
The India AI Impact Summit from 16-20 February 2026 in New Delhi was unlike the closed-door gatherings in Bletchley or the more government-centric forum in Paris. Around 300,000 people from every background walked through the doors, students, developers, civil servants, teachers, small business owners, a crowd
still from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QiT2yK-5-yg I recently reacted, rather negatively, to the interview with Yuval Harari at Davos 2026, My reaction was not quite on the points that it should have been. So let me restate my position more carefully. My concern is not
Photo by Sonika Agarwal on Unsplash Recent conversations with colleagues brought me, again, to the topic of synthetic data. Their arguments were familiar and, in many cases, reasonable: lack of representative data, privacy constraints, rare events, safety-critical edge cases. Synthetic data promises relief. Yet the more I listened, the
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“Those who only know Medicine, don’t even know Medicine". This sentence attributed to Abel Salazar (Portuguese physician, scientist, and artist who became significant for modernizing medical science in Portugal and linking science with humanist culture) this sentence that I found engraved on a wall of University of Porto,
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This reflection is prompted by attending the AAAI conference last week, an event that, with 10,000 participants, reached a record size, but the unease it triggered extends well beyond this particular meeting. Perhaps this reads as the perspective of a grumpy old lady. Point taken. But, if so, it
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This recent Science article on malicious AI swarms offers a sobering and largely convincing analysis of how agentic AI, when scaled and left unchecked, can threaten democratic discourse and institutions. I agree with most of its diagnosis: the combination of large language models with autonomous agents creates a powerful new
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Image by Istvan Brecz-Gruber from Pixabay 2026 is only a couple of weeks in, and AI is forcing concrete political choices. Governments have blocked systems like Grok over real-world harm [1], while energy and housing policies are being reshaped to accommodate power-hungry data centres, making clear that
On my upcoming book "The AI Paradox: How to Make Sense of a Complex Future". Princeton University Press, to appear Feb 17, 2026 I have been working in artificial intelligence since the late 1980s, long before AI became something people used daily or feared in headlines. Over the
Hanna Barakat & Archival Images of AI + AIxDESIGN / https://betterimagesofai.org / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Artificial intelligence does not transform society on its own. What truly shapes the future are human choices: the data we collect and value, the goals we set, the economic incentives we accept
(c) João Maia Pinto & Público (First published in Portuguese in Público on 28 December 2025) As this year draws to a close, it is hard to ignore the profound impact that artificial intelligence has had on public debate, economic strategies, geopolitical manoeuvring, and everyday practices. To grasp the speed