New Delhi, July 20 -- In a recent Financial Times column (2 July 2026, shorturl.at/y6B6Z), John Burn-Murdoch and Sarah O'Connor set out, lucidly and a little chillingly, the asymmetric risks of the AI revolution.

Burn-Murdoch's observation is that the threshold for danger sits far below the threshold for usefulness. For AI to pose a large-scale danger, it needs only to have a reasonable chance-one in two, say-of succeeding at the kind of software tasks that enable systems hacking or cyber-attacks, whose consequences are physical as much as digital.

By contrast, to replace human workers, it must be reliable and consistent close to 100% of the time across a wide range of tasks that extend well beyond software into the inherent messiness o...