A DOZEN years ago, I heard a presentation by the great Swedish statistician Hans Rosling, who worked in the field of data visualisation. Rosling dreamed of a dashboard for crises around the world. "We have dashboards for cars," he said, "but we don't have dashboards for the most important problems facing mankind."

Today, that dashboard is within our grasp. We're producing ever more powerful computers and advancing new methods for them to process information. These tools are beginning to help us understand the crisis going on around us. They also help us to identify patterns in order to prepare for, ameliorate, and perhaps even prevent crises that are going on. Crises of illnesses, natural disasters, and sustainability. We're at the point where AI is starting to dramatically improve humanity's ability to solve the sort of problems Rosling was thinking of.

For centuries, people have used technology to solve our problems, but we've also had to manage risks and challenges. To insist that the use of new technology bears no risks is to deny the march of human progress itself. Electricity can be used to power appliances, but it can also start unintended fires. That doesn't mean we stop using electricity. It means we use it more responsibly. The AI issue facing us today is essentially the same one that confronted our ancestors figuring out how to use electricity or fire. How do we get the good stuff from AI while guarding against its ill-effects?