AI should enhance rather than replace human effort, judgment, and meaningful work. Excessive reliance on AI risks weakening critical thinking, eroding trust, reducing dignity through job displacement, and increasing social isolation. Its development therefore requires regulation and practical wisdom to ensure technology serves the common good rather than efficiency and profit alone.

I perched on a heating unit at the rear of an overfilled auditorium. My fingers were stiff and my ears stung from the cold outside. I looked around. For the twelfth time, current and former heads of state, ambassadors, foreign ministers, academics, artists, and financiers had arrived with hundreds of students to discuss rearmament, nuclear risk, diplomacy and technology at the Harvard European Conference.