AI has given me a voice. It also showed me what we have to fear

My brain simply did not work in the way the school expected it to. The divergence between how I experienced the world and how others did set me apart from other children. It was a lonely place to be.

I am severely dyslexic and have dyspraxia, ADHD and some of the symptoms of autism, as well as an inability to create pictures or sounds in my mind, called aphantasia. What might seem routine to others - remembering names or avoiding bumping into people on a busy street - is for me a massive challenge. When I was tested in my forties, my reading age was 13 and my spelling age seven - the same as at school.

For most of my life, the abilities I lack have mattered far more to me than those I possess, despite a successful business career. I remember being seven on a football pitch and not knowing which direction to run. No one wanted me on their team. That mattered more to me than the fact that I could win at chess.

From an early age I desperately wanted to write. There were plays, stories and poems in my head, but my spelling was hopeless, my handwriting unreadable and sentences I thought clear made no sense to anyone else. Occasionally something escaped. I entered a poetry competition my school refused to enter me for. Their candidates won nothing. I won a prize the judges created especially for me. When the newspaper published the results, I refused to give them my school’s name and was listed as an independent entry. At university my handwriting was so difficult to read that I had to read my work aloud to get my third-class degree. In truth, I could not read it either.

Then I got a job in finance and discovered a simple solution: avoid writing altogether. But there was, and still is, a ticker tape running through my brain into the early hours. I have no mind’s eye for sounds or images. My brain is filled instead with concepts, arguments and possible outcomes, while I search for words to explain them. Success meant I could have assistants help translate my thoughts. They did it brilliantly, but the translation was sometimes different from what I meant.

Then along came AI. For the first time, I have a tool which can take that ticker tape of concepts and help turn it into structured language while I remain in control of the ideas. It does not provide my opinions or experiences. It helps me express them. Sometimes it waters me down. I think of it as taking a punk song and rewriting it for Smooth. The original concept is still there, but fewer people turn the radio off in horror.

Something that previously required days of exhausting work has become a joy rather than a pain. For neurodivergent people, this could be a pivotal moment. We talk about AI making productive people more productive. Perhaps one of its greatest contributions will be allowing people whose brains do not fit conventional mechanisms of communication to express ideas previously trapped inside them. That is an extraordinary liberation.

It is because I understand personally how powerful AI can be that I am also wary of it.

Every important technology gives human beings more power. And human beings have a fairly mixed record of what we do with power.

The printing press allowed ideas to travel further and faster than ever before. Some were brilliant. Some were lies. But it could only reproduce what a human being had already written.

AI can do something different. It can help create an argument, sharpen it, rewrite it and produce a different version for every person you want to persuade. If you are trying to explain or understand something complicated, that is extraordinary. If you are a fraudster, a bully or a political extremist, it is also extraordinary.

That is what worries me.

We split the atom and discovered an amazing source of energy. We also built the nuclear bomb. The science gave human beings vastly more power. What we did with it was our choice.

AI is a multiplier too. It can multiply intelligence, creativity and understanding. But it can also multiply prejudice, misinformation, cruelty and stupidity.

And it can do it at incredible speed.

A nasty remark can become a post, a meme, a video and a campaign seen by millions before the person on the receiving end has even had time to process the original remark. Thousands of people who know almost nothing about someone can join in the blood sport of destroying them, each feeling very little responsibility for the result.

Technology does not remove our responsibility for what we do. It increases it.

Scrutiny matters. People should be challenged and held accountable. But scrutiny and destruction are not the same thing. Nor are justice and vengeance.

When I was four, I went to Sunday School at Holy Trinity Church in Cookham. We were taught there that we are all flawed, and if we want forgiveness for our mistakes, we must have the humility to forgive others for theirs.

That may sound like a strange lesson for the age of artificial intelligence. I think it matters now more than ever.

After more than sixty years struggling to translate what is inside my head into words other people can understand, AI has given me something extraordinarily precious. It has given me a voice.

But AI has no idea whether that voice is being used for good or bad. We do.

The printing press multiplied knowledge. Splitting the atom multiplied our power. AI may multiply the best and the worst of us.

For now, what it multiplies is still our choice.

But we cannot spend all our time asking what AI can do and too little asking what it should do. The decisions we make now will determine what this technology becomes.

The choice is ours. We should make it while it still is.

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Guy Hands is the Founder of private equity firm Terra Firma.

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