We’re Fired.

AI is transforming how we work. Workforce disruptions are underway in wide swaths of the global economy. Jobs will change. Jobs will be lost. New jobs will be created.

Will AI fire us all? No. No more than a forest fire destroys everything. Or a house fire destroys a whole neighborhood. Even city-wide conflagrations like the London fire of 1666 or the San Francisco fire of 1906, while tragic, did not prevent those cities from recovering and thriving. We recognize the power of fire, both positive and destructive.

We don’t stop using fire because it is dangerous. We harness it.

To be clear, fire hurts. People lose their lives, their livelihoods, and their property. Because we are aware of the pain it can cause, we put risk mitigation in at every level. We teach children not to play with matches. We have family and business evacuation plans. We keep a pail of water or a hose near campfires, which we build in fire pits ringed with stone, brush cleared safely away. We label cotton children’s clothing with fire warnings and use fire-resistant materials in high-risk applications. We have fire departments. We insure against fire loss. We take fire, and our responsibility to control it as best we can, seriously.

While AI is certainly a powerful and disruptive technology, we should be asking how we can best harness it, rather than imagining we can make it go away.

Humans discovered ways to harness fire hundreds of thousands of years ago, maybe even more than a million years ago. We have had time to develop our personal and collective responses to fire. AI is new. We are just beginning to understand both the value and the risk associated with AI, and it is changing quickly.

Fire changed over time, too, but more slowly. Fire pits evolved into indoor furnaces. Candles evolved into incandescent light bulbs, which evolved into fluorescent bulbs, which evolved into LEDs. Some uses grew, and some risks shrank. Yet there were points of inflection in the evolution of fire. Gunpowder, for example. Native Americans called muskets fire sticks. We refer to weaponry as firepower. Unleashing atomic energy led to the ability to incinerate cities.

As these terrifying events unfolded, society responded. First, with local and regional rules and laws. As the risks became global, international laws and treaties evolved to control nuclear weapons proliferation. We can’t unlearn, but we can respond to what we learn. The Manhattan Project, and the legal and ethical frameworks that evolved as a result of its success, teach us that we have no choice but to live with the risks of both civilian and military nuclear power.

It is important that we face head-on the risks of AI that have recently been highlighted by experts at the frontier AI labs. We don’t have to be experts to know the potential damage AI can do, any more than we need to be nuclear physicists to understand that we never want another Hiroshima or Nagasaki. We need to recognize the danger of AI, not to try to stop it, but to control it.

We are not helpless.

We can participate in the dialogues about the ethical use of AI. We can learn how AI actually works. We can apply it to our personal and professional lives so our participation in policy discussions is grounded in knowledge rather than fear. We can support workforce upskilling. We can tell our business and political representatives that we need them to understand how AI can both help and hurt us. We will need the AI equivalents of volunteer fire departments and global fire regulations. We can do a lot. So, let’s.

Mason Scurry and I founded AIctualize to help businesses achieve measurable business results from the application of AI technologies to reimagined business processes. That’s working. And it’s also teaching us that we all have to harness AI as responsibly as societies have harnessed the power of fire. We need to do that to thrive. And maybe to survive.