AI Could Cure Cancer or Cement Autocracy. Which Way It Goes Is Up to Us

Key points

• Katherine Rundell, Oxford academic and author, warns that AI is already shifting wealth toward a tiny group of individuals.
• She argues AI enables disinformation at unprecedented scale, mass surveillance, and lethal autonomous weapons.
• She also sees real benefits: faster cancer research, sharper disaster warnings, cheaper access to legal help.
• Her central claim, published in The Guardian, is that who controls AI matters more than what AI can do.

Two futures live inside the same technology. That's the uncomfortable argument Katherine Rundell puts to readers this week, and it's hard to dismiss.

On one side: a tool that could speed cancer research, help disabled people live more independently, and give ordinary citizens the kind of legal knowledge that currently costs hundreds of pounds an hour. Flood and wildfire warnings could sharpen. Scientists could find patterns in Earth's ecosystems no human team could spot alone.

On the other side sits something darker.

What is Rundell actually warning about?

Her sharpest concern is concentration of power. AI, she writes, is already enabling a "breathtaking shift" of wealth from the many to a tiny group of men whose attitude toward human life she finds alarming. She doesn't name them, but the point lands.

Beyond wealth, she flags three dangers. Disinformation at a scale no previous technology could match: AI generates fake text and video without armies of human workers. Mass surveillance, giving governments or corporations the ability to watch citizens so completely that dissent becomes dangerous. And lethal autonomous weapons, military systems that select and kill targets without a human making the final call.

Taken together, she argues, these capabilities describe something close to a ready-made toolkit for authoritarian rule. Disinformation in particular is a thread we've tracked since 31 July, when the EU moved to require labels on AI-generated content precisely because the problem had grown visible enough to legislate.

Does this mean AI is bad?

Rundell says no, but she sets a hard condition. The benefits only materialise if the people controlling the technology have something like good values. If AI ends up in the hands of "crooks and despots", the medical breakthroughs become irrelevant.

That's not a technical argument. It's a political one.

Her focus is education: classrooms are where the next generation of voters and policymakers form their assumptions about what technology is for. She's worried those minds are being shaped by tools built for engagement and efficiency rather than curiosity and critical thought. Dave Eggers made a similar case in July when he told 200 OpenAI staff their chatbot is "silencing a generation", and the argument hasn't weakened since.

What matters most here is the framing, not the technology. Rundell's piece is being oversold in some quarters as a doom warning, but it's really a governance argument dressed in vivid language. What to watch: whether education policy catches up before the defaults get locked in.

What does this mean for ordinary people?

The practical implication is less about which app you use and more about who you vote for and what questions you ask of the companies building these systems.

For parents, the immediate question Rundell raises is whether the version of AI students meet at school builds their thinking or quietly replaces it. Ask your child's school what its policy on AI tools is. That conversation won't keep.

Common questions

Is AI actually being used for surveillance already?

Yes. Governments in several countries already use AI-powered facial recognition and data analysis to monitor citizens. The technology isn't hypothetical.

Can AI really help find a cure for cancer?

AI tools are already used in cancer research to analyse medical scans and identify drug candidates faster than human researchers alone. Results so far are promising but cures remain years away.

Should I be worried about AI and my child's education?

The debate is live. Ask your child's school whether critical thinking is still explicitly taught alongside any AI tools it has adopted.