'Careless use of AI is the real threat - not the ghost stories'

There's something almost perversely poetic about humanity's relationship with artificial intelligence. We stand at the edge of a technological revolution, our eyes fixed on the horizon for a Terminator-style apocalypse—or worse, a digital god awakening from its server rack slumber. But Meredith Whittaker, one of the most clear-eyed critics in the field, wants us to look down. The real threat, she tells BBC Global Women, isn't the ghost in the machine. It's the careless hand on the keyboard. Whittaker's argument is a masterclass in reframing. For years, the most breathless headlines have been reserved for "existential risk"—the idea that AI might one day outsmart us, escape its box, and turn us into paperclips. These are compelling narratives, yes. But they are, in Whittaker's view, "ghost stories"—distractions that obscure the far more mundane, far more immediate dangers. The AI systems already embedded in hiring software, predictive policing, healthcare triage, and social media algorithms aren't waiting for some future singularity to wreak havoc. They're doing it now, quietly, through biased data and thoughtless deployment. This is where the story gets genuinely weird—and genuinely wild. The most radical idea in Whittaker's interview isn't that AI is dangerous. It's that the danger is banal. It lives not in rogue superintelligence but in boardroom decisions, in rushed rollouts, in the absence of accountability. The ghost stories, she suggests, may even serve a function:they shift our attention away from the corporations and governments deploying these tools irresponsibly, and onto a fictional, far-off menace that requires no immediate action. It's a conjurer's trick, writ large across our collective psyche. And here's the cosmic irony:by obsessing over the "ghosts," we may be creating the very conditions for real harm. Careless use of AI—in surveillance, in automated decision-making, in the relentless extraction of personal data