Artificial intelligence and humanity: AI is here, now we have to decide what to do with it

10 Jun 2026, 20:00 by Dr Siobhán O’Sullivan, https://www.thejournal.ie/author/dr-siobhán-o’sullivan/ · TheJournal.ie

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE HAS quietly woven itself into the fabric of our daily lives, so much so that most of us don’t even notice it’s there.

It curates the news you read, autocorrects your messages, flags fraud on your bank account in real time, and adjusts your home’s heating without you touching the thermostat.

Official figures tell us that one in eight people on the planet are actively using AI, with Ireland ranked 4th globally for AI adoption. In 2025, 45% of Irish people were using AI tools, and nearly six in 10 large Irish enterprises have already integrated AI into their operations. Given the pace at which this technology moves, those figures are already out of date and likely to be much higher.

AI holds real promise. It can help us detect and treat disease, open up new ways of learning and drive economic prosperity. But it also brings serious risks. It can introduce and amplify bias into decision-making, lead to job disruption and be misused to fuel deepfakes, cybercrime and mass surveillance.

The recently published report from the National Economic and Social Council (NESC) “Artificial Intelligence in Service of Society: Navigating our Way Forward”, addresses how we can manage that tension to ensure that AI develops in a way which can deliver benefits for all in a safe, fair and sustainable manner. There is a narrow window of opportunity to actively shape that process, ensuring that the AI transformation is one we have actually chosen, rather than one which has simply arrived.

The next phase

AI should be understood as a sociotechnical transformation. That means recognising that AI doesn’t operate in a vacuum, its ultimate impact, both positive and negative, is dictated by the social, political and economic contexts it inhabits. We only need to look at social media to see how this plays out.

Social media has transformed how we communicate, how we consume news, how we shop and what we buy, and created harms we hadn’t anticipated. By the time these “second order” effects became clear, they were already entrenched in the fabric of our daily lives. AI is no different, only faster and more ubiquitous.

The choices we make now will be instrumental in determining the kind of AI we get. We need to shift the focus from the technical capabilities of AI to ask deeper questions around what AI should be doing, for whom and in what contexts.

Responsible adoption of AI means starting with the right question: ‘What problem are we trying to solve, and is AI the best way to solve it?’ Getting AI to work in practice means matching the right tool to the right problem and having the capacity to use, manage and evaluate it effectively.

Getting adoption right is only part of the challenge. AI also needs to be safe, ethical and trustworthy in practice, and that is harder than it sounds. AI systems can perform well in controlled settings but are often less reliable in the real world. They can hallucinate, producing outputs that sound plausible but are incorrect. They can reflect and amplify the biases present in the data they were trained on. This matters enormously when AI is being used to make decisions that directly affect people’s lives, whether that is about medical care, eligibility for services, or access to credit.

Getting it right

Terms like ‘ethical’ and ‘responsible’ AI are hollow phrases unless they are backed by concrete requirements embedded in real tools, processes, and matched with the ethical capability both at the individual and institutional level, to translate principles into practice. The controversy surrounding Grok’s “nudify” app serves as a stark warning: without clear boundaries and accountability, AI will be used to exploit our vulnerabilities rather than serve the public good.

The future of AI is genuinely uncertain, which means governance designed for today’s systems may be wholly inadequate for tomorrow. We need approaches to governance that can anticipate various AI futures and help us prepare for them. This means detecting early signals of emerging risks, adjusting course before problems become entrenched, and ensuring that values like fairness and accountability are built in from the start rather than bolted on after the fact. It also means involving citizens, workers and affected communities in shaping how AI develops, not simply consulting them after decisions have already been made.