Ready to have your bank account erased? Why our inaction on AI is terrifying

I am terrified for the next five years. Let me explain why.

I was in the car with my parents yesterday. We were talking about AI. My father asked me, “Does AI exist yet, like is it already being deployed?” I explained to him that yes, it is and that without even realizing it — hello, Siri — he uses it every single day.

He was shocked. He thought AI was something still being worked on in a lab somewhere — not yet real, not yet here.

My father is not just your average Boomer. Without any doubt or exaggeration, he is the smartest person I know. He was a highly successful entrepreneur in his time and retired at the age of 42 to help care for my older brother. He is brilliant, curious, endlessly capable — and he has absolutely no idea.

That’s the thing that keeps me up at night. What scares me is that most of our legislators are exactly like him — well, perhaps minus the intelligence, in some cases. Smart or not, they have absolutely no idea what AI is, what it is doing right now, or what it is going to do to the economy and our national security over the next five years. But unlike my father, they have the power to do something about it.

As I explained to my father, AI is not some theory in the clouds. It has existed in a meaningful sense since the 1940s and 1950s, most famously embodied by Alan Turing, whose work broke Nazi Germany’s Enigma code and helped end World War II. The most relatable milestone for most people came in 1997, when IBM’s Deep Blue — an AI system — defeated the reigning world chess champion. 

By my definition, AI is an autonomous system that perceives its environment and acts within it to achieve a goal. There are two types: narrow AI and general AI. Narrow AI fits the chess example. The system might be the best chess player in the world, but it cannot do anything else — it can’t even choose to play checkers. It is unbeatable at one thing but forever confined to it. We have had narrow AI for decades.

General AI is different. It does something closer to actual thinking. It reasons and adapts. That’s the Terminator. That’s HAL from “2001: A Space Odyssey.” We used to think it was generations away. As recently as 2020, I was saying that myself. I was wrong.

We are almost there. And almost, at this speed, means now. There are two immediate threats that our legislators are either ignoring or simply don’t understand.

The first is mass unemployment — and of a wholly different nature from what we have weathered before. For every five lawyers working today, there will be just one in about five years. AI can already write contracts and identify legal issues better than most attorneys. (It still has its issues, but that should be cleared up soon enough.)

Employers aren’t blind. They will catch on. For entry-level jobs — customer service, data entry, administrative work — it will be far worse. Twenty jobs will become one. My own job as a professor? I estimate a 15-to-1 reduction, at minimum. We are not talking about a recession — we are talking about a structural dismantling of the workforce as we know it.

The second threat is cybersecurity — and it could hit you personally, today. Anthropic recently delayed the release of a model update after it demonstrated dangerous hacking abilities that could even crack our banking infrastructure. They were a good actor, but others will not be. Think about that. What would you do if you woke up tomorrow and your bank account or retirement fund has been emptied by someone using AI hacking tools? Do you have six months’ worth of cash? Because the investigation will take at least that long. Not to mention that all of your passwords will become useless. 

That’s before we even raise bigger issues, like the power grid, military systems, or critical infrastructure. Everything will be under attack and vulnerable like never before.

Every generation believes it is living through the most pivotal moment in history. My father asked me if this is just another cycle — another round of unnecessary panic. It’s a fair question, but let’s look at the facts.

After Thomas Edison received the patent for the lightbulb in 1880, it took 80 years for electricity to reach every corner of the U.S. ChatGPT, on the other hand, reached 100 million users in two months.

AI capability is doubling roughly every six to 12 months. That’s not a linear progression but a cliff’s edge. The speed alone should terrify you. This is not like what has come before.

Every other transformative technology gave us time to adapt, regulate and absorb the shock. AI is not giving us time — it is outrunning us.

Our legislators need to act — not study, not form a committee, not schedule a hearing for next quarter, but act. They are, at this point, the only ones who still can. The question is whether they will understand the problem before it’s already too late to solve it.

Liberty Vittert Capito is a professor of data science at Washington University in St. Louis and the resident on-air statistician for NewsNation, a sister company of The Hill.

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