I spend much of my time writing about the grave threat AI development poses to us all, because it looks both urgent and woefully under-addressed. Like many technologies, however, AI also has major benefits, a few examples of which we can see in the news today.
One case study: Bloomberg reported a partnership between Google and Cathay Pacific aimed at an unusual climate intervention: avoiding contrails.
Contrails form when humid, hot engine exhaust hits cold air and freezes into ice crystals. They can persist for hours in the right conditions, and they can trap heat like clouds sometimes do, warming the Earth below.
Predictive modeling, aided by AI, can let pilots avoid the patches of cold, humid air that make contrails stick around. A “pilot project” (blame Bloomberg for the pun) in 2025 “achieved a 40% decline in the warming impact of contrails.”
Another area that seems likely to benefit from AI is drug development. Bloomberg wrote that a drug called rentosertib, created with AI help, showed promising results in a preliminary study of lung fibrosis patients.
Both Bloomberg and the New York Times frame the drug as potentially slowing aging, based on measurements of biological “aging clocks” which are themselves based on AI models. A bit of research suggests that this is probably overstating what the drug can really do — it could easily be treating the patients’ actual disease, say by reducing inflammation, and thereby improving various health markers — but the general trend of AI contributing to drug discovery is real, and it’s prompting significant investment from the medical industry.
Even the automated excavators I covered earlier today could be a net good for humanity, just as the steam drill once was.
I choose to focus on these examples because technology is complicated. We can see evidence that AI is real and often positively transformative, and evidence that blindly scaling towards superhuman systems will end badly for us; both these things can be true at once. We’re a bit like Tolkien’s dwarves digging greedily in the mines of Moria; some of us already know or suspect there’s a Balrog down there that would destroy us and all our gains, but there’s also lots of shiny gold. We don’t know exactly how far we can dig before we hit a point of no return.
Controlling this technology doesn’t require shutting down all the potential benefits; a halt to frontier development still leaves plenty of room for predictive weather models, AI-assisted drug development, and special-purpose machinery. But there would almost certainly be some veins of gold we’d have to leave untouched for a time.
Being a credible voice for coordinated restraint means being willing to sincerely acknowledge, even celebrate, the real good that AI technology can bring, while still holding firm that in this mine, we shouldn’t dig deeper than our science can see.
The analyses and opinions expressed on AI StopWatch reflect the views of the individual contributors and the sources they cover, and should not be taken as official positions of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.