AI - From Revolution to Evolution

TED Crawley, 2026

Earlier this year I delivered a TEDx talk about AI in my local area, Crawley.

With all the hype and fear around AI, I felt some perspective was needed. In many ways, this leap is not so different from the ones we’ve made before - steam, steel, computers, the internet - and each time we adapted and moved on.

But in one important way, it is different. For the first time, we’ve built a technology in our own image - and that changes the lessons to be learnt. They’re not just about safety and jobs, but about what AI reveals about ourselves, our society, and what we can learn from looking in that mirror.

Have a watch or read below, with citations included for your reference.

The Hype

Everywhere you look right now, everything seems to be labelled with AI, created by AI, powered by AI.

And people are saying it’s unprecedented. That it’s going to get more intelligent than us, bigger than us, and take over - and who knows what else?

But I am going to say something that might sound strange - and familiar.

We’ve been here before.

We’ve Been Here Before: Lessons From Past Technological Revolutions

Not with this exact technology. But with this kind of change, and this kind of fear.

This is at least the third time in our modern history we have built something that has outdone us - and each time, we panicked, but each time, we adapted and evolved.

The Industrial Revolution: When Machines Outworked Us

Start with the Industrial Revolution. We took steam and steel, and we built machines that were stronger and more efficient than any human could ever be.

But they disrupted the way we worked, replaced some jobs and posed a safety risk - in some instances, horrendous working conditions.

In 1891, in the middle of all this upheaval, Pope Leo XIII wrote a letter to the world. He’d watched the Industrial Revolution turn people into cogs - bodies spent on a production line - and he warned us not to let the machine strip away what makes us human. Don’t treat people like machines. And then we adapted, made them work for us, and we moved on.

And at first, we thought those machines belonged in factories.

They didn’t stay there. Today they are around us all the time - in our homes; we travel by road, rail, sea and air in them - and in many ways we place our lives in their hands, without a thought.

We didn’t just build engines and machines. We folded them into ordinary life until we stopped noticing them.

Then we did it again, with the information and digital age. The first computers filled an entire floor of a building and cost a fortune. And we shrank them and increased their capacity. I remember a stage where a set of encyclopaedias that once needed a wall of shelves in a library could fit in a personal computer, then a laptop, and now a tiny chip. And then we connected the computers with the internet - so hundreds of thousands of sets of information of all sorts became accessible to us in an instant.

We rely on banks online for all our transactions, our savings, our money.

It’s so embedded into our industry that it’s now rare to find a business that doesn’t use computers, the internet, or some sort of software for something. It’s even rarer to find a job these days that does not require you to use a computer.

But the more we made information and digital commerce accessible, the more risks and dangers came about - the dark web, viruses and cybercrime.

Again, we adapted and evolved and folded them into our ordinary lives - with hundreds of microchips in this room right now. In your pockets, on your wrist, or even wrapped around a finger or two.

So you see the pattern. We build and produce things that outperform us in various ways and take us to new heights. Initially they disrupt how we do things, they present risks - but we adapt, and normalise them into our lives. From engines and machines, to information and computers - and every one of these, we built out there, outside ourselves. Stronger than us, faster than us, and now more intelligent than us.

And now we have built artificial intelligence.

Why the AI Revolution Feels Different

We are now in the midst of a new revolution, one we have been climbing towards for many years.

But somehow it feels a bit different - because this technology is not just another type of tool.

When we built engines, we didn’t exactly copy the horse. When we built computers, they didn’t work like a brain. But when we built AI, we copied how we think.

We looked at our brain and how it works. The way our neurons connect and fire. And we built artificial ones - billions of parameters standing in for billions of neurons in a new neural network. We didn’t just make it logical, the way machines or computers seem to be.

We made it a little bit random, to emulate creativity. We gave it the ability to weigh context, to reason, and now even to act on its own, with agency.

We made it so much like us that it does the very things we’d never forgive a machine for. It makes mistakes - just like we do. It gets things wrong - and confidently so. It hallucinates.

Raising AI: The Adolescence of a Technology

The CEO of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, wrote an essay this year called The Adolescence of Technology. Anyone here who has lived with teenagers in their family will know exactly what he is talking about. He likens where we are with AI to adolescence - suddenly being handed the keys to enormous power, thinking you know everything, yet unsure what to do with it.

Does that sound familiar?

It should. Because we didn’t build a tool. We built something that grows and evolves - something so organism-like that the people who develop these models have to study and test each version, to reverse-engineer it, to try to understand what they’ve created.

This is not just a throwaway metaphor - it’s more real than we think. Sam Altman, who runs OpenAI - the creators of ChatGPT - has said in effect: We don’t fully know how it works. We only know how to train it.

Think about that. We only know how to raise it. We can’t entirely predict what it grows into.

Companion AI and the Rise of Artificial Connection

When ChatGPT upgraded last year - from version 4 to version 5 - something happened the engineers didn’t expect.

People grieved.

The new version had a different personality. And to a lot of people, it felt like they’d lost a friend. They went online, in their thousands, to say so.

Now, ten years ago, if I’d told you that millions of people would form real attachments to a piece of software - talk to it for comfort, for company, sometimes instead of the people in their lives - you’d have laughed. Who wants to talk to a robot, right?

But that’s exactly where we are. There’s a whole industry now - they call it companion AI. Apps built for conversation. Friendship. Romance. Someone, or something, to talk to.

Think about the person at three in the morning with no one to call. The one whose anxiety only ever speaks to an empty room. And now - something answers. Something says, I hear you. You’ve got this. And it helped. That is not nothing. To someone who feels invisible, being heard by anything can be the difference between a good night and a terrible one.

But look at the generation growing up inside this. Last year, researchers at Common Sense Media, working with the University of Chicago, surveyed American teenagers. Nearly three-quarters of them had already used an AI companion.

And this is the one that stopped me.

One in three of those teenagers said they’d chosen to talk to the AI instead of a person - for a serious conversation. The conversation that matters most.

So you have to ask: is that connection, or is it retreat? Is the machine healing the loneliness - or quietly making sure we never have to do the hard work of turning to each other?

Two Popes, One Warning, 135 Years Apart

And here’s something else that got me.

Earlier this year, our current Pope - Leo the Fourteenth - wrote his first letter to the world. And he chose that name, Leo, on purpose. He signed his letter on the fifteenth of May - one hundred and thirty-five years to the day after Leo the Thirteenth signed his.

But listen to how the worry has flipped. Leo the Thirteenth warned us not to treat humans like machines. And now Leo the Fourteenth includes a warning to us about the opposite - not to confuse machines with humans.

Same name, same date and same moment in a revolution.

AI as a Mirror: What It Reveals About Being Human

I’ve chosen this because it’s one of the more controversial sides of AI - but there are many more, where there are polarised sides to the debate: art, journalism, healthcare advice, music, the disruption in the job market versus the emergence of a whole new economy.

And in every one of them, it’s the same thing happening. AI is holding up a mirror to us. In some ways it shows up our flaws, our fears, our weaknesses. And in others, it reflects back our ambition, our creativity, the best of what we can do.

It’s forcing us to question intelligence, wisdom and judgement - the difference between having emotions and showing them, what it means to be conscious, and what it means to be human.

These are really big questions - sparked by a really big leap in technology.

So how do we evolve from here?

I’m not talking about it from a biology point of view - something taking millennia. I’m talking about how we evolve and change as a society, as businesses, as governments, as families and as people - the kind that happens in years, or months.

And that gives us both an opportunity and a challenge. The opportunity, if we embrace it, is to evolve with it - to grow, discover, invent and solve. The challenge is to do that without losing what we hold dear - to nurture, protect and safeguard what makes us human in the first place.

So the real question to me was never whether AI is good or bad. We already know the answer to that - every leap we’ve ever made had two sides, opportunity and risk - the larger the power and the leap, the larger the responsibility - but each and every time, we adapted.

The real question to me is what the mirror is showing us, and what we do with that.

For our entire history, we’ve built things out there - engines, machines, computers, the internet, and now AI and robots. We’ve spent all of that time looking and acting outward.

But this time, we built it in our own image. And that’s why it feels different. It isn’t just another thing out in the world - it’s a mirror to what is inside us.

So maybe we should turn our focus around. Ask what it’s teaching us about ourselves that we’ve taken for granted.

This technology that is inherent within us - the beauty and power of the human experience, our intuitions, our dreams, our own thoughts, our subconscious. All there to prompt and engineer in whatever ways we choose.

So a few questions still ring in my ears;

How artificial is artificial intelligence - and in building it and working with it, are we not simply continuing our own evolution inwards?

What will we choose to change as a society alongside it?

And how will you choose to change?

Thank you.