They carried hammers in their hands and hatred in their hearts. The new machines, fast and brutally efficient, had stolen their livelihoods and robbed them of their self-worth, reducing skilled craftsmen to little more than slave labour in grimy factories.

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Their anger quickly turned to violence. Calling themselves Luddites, they formed organised gangs and attacked the machines - mechanised looms performing the work of dozens of talented weavers. When their hammers failed them they fired guns and torched mills. The Luddites lost, of course, with many paying for their defiance of progress at the end of a noose.

Humanity has always feared new technology. Those Luddites of the early 1800s smashed looms. Much later, radio would be accused of destroying conversation, television for turning our brains into mush and the Internet for fracturing attention spans and bastardising truth.

But this time it's the inventors of technology who are afraid.

An increasing number of those behind the artificial intelligence revolution now altering our world at unprecedented speed are issuing alarming warnings. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt says AI is advancing faster than our ability to adapt to it. Geoffrey Hinton, hailed as AI's godfather, now regrets much of his life's work, saying it could wipe us out within decades.

"I have suddenly switched my views on whether these things are going to be more intelligent than us," Hinton says. "I think they're very close to it now and they will be much more intelligent than us in the future. How do we survive that?"

It's a strange moment in history when the architects of new technology urge the world to be wary of their creations. So why isn't this debate consuming the conversations of politicians and everyone else concerned about the future of our species?

The Australian government's hands-off approach to this thorny issue is typical of most Western nations - out of step with the magnitude of the moment. Consider how quickly it restricted social media access to those under the age of 16. Yet faced by a far more complex and profoundly transformative technology (the World Economic Forum estimates AI will eliminate almost 100 million jobs in the next three years) its policy has been to cautiously whisper rather than shout.

It's not an isolated stance. But it underscores how much we have been conditioned by the digital revolution's decades of rapid change. Two centuries ago the Luddites greeted the arrival of advanced machines with fear and fury. We offer a shrug of indifferent acceptance, knowing we have stepped through a door without comprehending what lies on the other side.

It would be dishonest to deny the genuine wonder at what AI can and could accomplish. Two years ago we laughed at its childlike inability to render images with realistic human hands and faces. But in the past week several Chinese firms, including the tech giant ByteDance,........

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