In partnership with

Stay ahead with the most recent breakthroughs—here’s what’s new and making waves in AI-powered productivity:

• Amazon Quick Suite A next-generation agentic AI platform for enterprises, Amazon Quick Suite automates business tasks, connects to hundreds of apps, and analyzes all forms of enterprise data—not just databases. It features over 50 built-in connectors to popular services like SharePoint, Snowflake, Outlook, and ServiceNow, plus native support for over 1,000 additional apps. Quick Suite can create complex business workflows, making it a powerful platform for modern work automation.

• Adobe Agent Composer & Agent SDK Adobe’s new enterprise AI agent platform enables businesses to build, configure, and deploy specialized agents in marketing and customer experience workflows. The addition of an Agent Registry and out-of-the-box agents allows deeper automation and coordination across Adobe’s product suite and via ecosystem partners.

• Kortex A newly surfaced AI-powered personal knowledge management (PKM) app, Kortex integrates notes, tasks, goals, and “linked thinking” in one streamlined workspace. Targeted at creators and professionals, Kortex adopts AI for smart organization, semantic search, and goal tracking, effectively working as a second brain.

• NetSuite Next SuiteApp.AI Marketplace NetSuite’s large new release includes the NetSuite Next platform, which incorporates practical AI capabilities into business management (ERP), with embedded conversational intelligence, agentic workflows, and a just-launched AI SuiteApp Marketplace for fast-deployable AI-powered extensions.

• Meta Generative AI Assistants - AI Assistants and creative tools for advertisers and creators, plus a business agent for SMB productivity. Creators and advertisers get streamlined, automated discovery, AI-powered ad variations, and video/music generation—for faster campaign testing and output. AI-persona-based image ad generation and “virtual try-on” for e-commerce, plus API access to the Instagram Creator Marketplace

Amazon Quick Suite

Amazon Web Services’ strategic entry into the agentic AI productivity platform race. Unlike traditional BI tools, Quick Suite enables organizations to automate and orchestrate tasks across siloed apps, data stores, and departments—leveraging over 50 direct integrations and support for 1,000+ more via MCP servers. That means a marketing executive can launch a campaign, analyze related data from multiple platforms, trigger documentation, and notify legal—automatically.

The Quick Suite uses a conversational interface and deep-data search. Its agentic AI can conduct research, create visual analytics, and run complex workflows that span multiple internal systems—ranging from Outlook to Google Drive to Databricks. AWS highlights that the platform’s unique value lies in connecting not just structured corporate data, but also intranet documents, wikis, and unstructured information, giving an enterprise a truly unified productivity layer.

What Scares People About AI

For a long time, science fiction has prepared us for the possibility of AI, and it was not always great. There was HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey that went on a rampage against a space ship crew, Skynet that sent terminators to eliminate all humans, and the Matrix which enslaved humanity.

So, well before ChatGPT emerged, we were all primed to the idea that AI could be bad. Right now, though, it’s just helping us with writing, doing some coding for us, and making fun videos, and no one is being turned into a human battery by it. Still there are a lot of worries emerging from this new tech. So exactly what scares people about AI?

Will AI Take Our Jobs?

One of the first things people worry about is job displacement – the fear that robots and algorithms will steal human jobs. Automation anxiety isn’t new (we’ve been fretting about machines replacing workers since at least the Industrial Revolution), but AI takes it to another level. Unlike old-school factory robots that replaced assembly line workers, modern AI can potentially handle white-collar and creative tasks too. It used to be “learning to code” was the way to future proof your job acumen, but now the computers have learned to code themselves – along with writing reports, drafting legal documents, or even generating artwork. This raises a scary question: Is any job truly safe? Surveys show a significant number of workers are nervous, and we’ve already seen companies using AI chatbots or software to do work that people used to do, from customer service to basic copywriting. Each news story about AI advances – a chatbot passing a medical exam, an algorithm designing a logo – adds to that unease.

Part of what makes this fear real is that it's already happening in small ways. For example, some media and entertainment workers have protested against AI taking over their work. (Hollywood writers went on strike in 2023 partly because studios were eyeing AI as a cheap way to draft scripts, which writers saw as a direct threat to their careers). Many people worry that as AI improves, companies will be eager to cut costs by automating tasks, and workers might be left struggling to find new roles. Yes, optimists argue that AI will also create new jobs (and it likely will – from AI maintenance to new creative roles we can’t imagine yet). But the transition could be rocky. The fear of mass unemployment or a gig economy where humans serve the machines is palpable. In short, AI makes people insecure about their livelihood, and that hits close to home for just about everyone.

What’s Real Anymore? Misinformation and Deepfakes

In the era of AI, it's getting harder to trust what our eyes and ears tell us. Misinformation is a huge fear tied to AI, especially with the rise of deepfakes and other AI-generated content. Deepfakes are hyper-realistic fake images, videos, or audio crafted by AI, and they can be very convincing and only getting better. People are scared that AI will flood the world with fake news, fake photos, and fake videos – to the point that we can't tell what's real. AI generated images are fooling people all the time, and there have also been deepfake videos of politicians saying things they never actually said. The idea that anyone could make a phony video of a world leader declaring war (or a fake audio of your boss firing you, or of you saying something you never said) is profoundly unsettling.

The broader fear is that AI-driven misinformation could undermine our ability to know truth from lies. If we reach a point where a normal person can’t tell a real video from a fake one, trust in media and information could collapse. We might become cynical about everything (“video or it didn’t happen” won’t be good enough when videos can be fabricated by anyone with a computer). This could erode public trust in institutions and each other. Even on a personal level, people worry about scams – like getting a call from what sounds exactly like your family member saying they’re in trouble, but it’s actually an AI voice clone trying to trick you. We’re entering an age where seeing (or hearing) is no longer believing, and that has a lot of folks on edge. The term “post-truth” gets thrown around; with AI, some fear we’ll be deep into that territory, battling an infodemic of fake content. It’s a fear of losing our grip on reality in a very literal sense.

Is AI Killing Creativity?

On a more personal (and cultural) level, a lot of people are worried about AI’s impact on human creativity and originality. This fear comes up often in conversations with artists, writers, musicians – basically anyone who creates content. The concern is that if AI can generate paintings, music, or articles in seconds, what happens to human art and creativity? One anxiety is that human creators will be pushed aside. Why would a company hire an artist or a designer when an AI can pump out dozens of images or logos for cheap? We've already seen AI-generated artwork winning contests and AI-written articles on websites. This makes people in creative professions feel threatened (hence the aforementioned strikes and protests in Hollywood and beyond over the use of AI in content creation). It’s not just about jobs, though; it’s also a bit philosophical. If a beautiful piece of art or a great novel can be churned out by an algorithm that has no life experience or feelings, does that cheapen the value of art? A lot of folks feel that art and creativity are inherently human – tied to our emotions, our imperfections, our unique perspectives. AI, on the other hand, just predicts patterns based on data. As one writer cleverly put it, AI doesn’t truly create, it just rearranges what already exists. That leads to fears that AI-produced content will be kind of soulless, lacking the emotional depth or genuine inspiration that a person would bring.

Another angle is the fear that people (especially young people or aspiring creators) will become lazy or less creative because it's so easy to have AI do the grunt work. For instance, why learn to draw or compose music if an AI can do it after you type a prompt? There’s a worry that human skills could atrophy and that we might lose some of our creative diversity. Some critics say that if everyone uses the same AI tools trained on the same data, everything might start looking and sounding the same – a kind of creative homogenization. Imagine a future where a lot of movies, songs, or books feel formulaic because they were generated by algorithms aiming to please the widest audience (or copying past hits). That prospect scares people who value creativity as a core part of humanity. We don’t want to become consumers of endless machine-generated content, because it feels like it might dull the spark of human creativity. In short, people fear AI could make our world less human in an artistic sense, flooding us with technically proficient but meaningless content, and making it harder for real human talents to shine.

Losing Purpose: What If AI Does Everything?

Zooming out a bit, there’s a more philosophical or existential fear: What happens to human purpose if AI gets really, really good? This is the kind of question that comes up late at night or in deep conversations about the future. It's not just about jobs or art – it's about meaning. A lot of our society is built around the idea that people contribute through work, creativity, or relationships. If AI eventually can do most tasks better, faster, and cheaper than us, then what do we humans do all day? Some people are genuinely worried about a future where humans feel obsolete. Even today, we derive purpose from our careers, from being needed in some role.

This worry overlaps with concerns about inequality, too. People wonder: Will AI advancements lead to a world where a few tech owners benefit and the masses struggle to find meaning? For instance, if your job as a driver, or a doctor, or a teacher is all taken over by AI, do you then rely on some form of universal basic income and spend your days in leisure? Some might cheer for that, but others fear it could be a depressing existence if it’s not by choice. Historically, work and contribution have been tied to dignity. There’s a fear of creating a “useless class” of people who want to contribute but can’t find a way to that feels meaningful. Of course, humans are adaptable – new forms of purpose could emerge (maybe more focus on community, arts, etc., if survival needs are met by AI and robots). But that’s a big societal shift, and it’s no wonder many people feel uneasy contemplating it. In essence, this fear is asking: Where do humans fit in a future dominated by intelligent machines? It’s a question without a clear answer yet, which is exactly why it keeps people up at night.

When AI Outsmarts Us: Existential Fears

Finally, we come to the biggest, most sci-fi sounding fear: the worry that AI could one day become so powerful that it escapes our control – or even turns on us. This is the realm of "superintelligence" and doomsday scenarios, often exemplified in movies like the aforementioned Skynet from the movie The Terminator. It’s easy to laugh off some of these scenarios as over-the-top, but interestingly, a lot of serious people are concerned about long-term AI safety. In one statement, dozens of AI experts even compared the risk of unaligned AI to the risk of a nuclear holocaust or a global pandemic. In other words, they’re treating it as an existential threat – something that could, in a worst-case scenario, literally wipe out humanity if it goes wrong.

So why exactly are they so worried? One fear is that a super-intelligent AI might pursue goals that conflict with human well-being, either due to a programming glitch or because we mishandled its objectives. This is often framed as the “alignment problem” – how do we ensure a super smart AI’s values line up with ours? If it doesn’t, things could get dystopian fast. People imagine scenarios like an AI that is told to "solve climate change," and it decides the best way is to remove humans (since we’re the biggest polluters) – obviously not what we intended! Even short of outright evil, a super-AI could unintentionally cause chaos if it doesn’t understand human nuances. There’s also the fear of a runaway intelligence explosion (often called the Singularity), where AI starts improving itself beyond our control. The unknown factor – that “no one knows what happens next” once AI surpasses human smarts – is itself terrifying. It’s basically fear of the unknown, amplified by the stakes of extinction. Now, it’s worth noting that not everyone in the AI field thinks this will happen, and some think these fears are overblown. But just the fact that credible experts are voicing them has made the public more aware. In the end, the ultimate fear about AI is a loss of control: that we create something we can’t undo or command, and it changes the world in ways we really don’t want. That’s a plot straight out of science fiction, but it’s increasingly part of real-world conversations about AI.

Conclusion: Facing Our AI Fears

From the practical to the profound, the fears surrounding AI cover a lot of ground. You might recognize some of your own worries in this list. Perhaps you’re concerned about your job or creeped out by the idea of art made by a machine. Or maybe the thought of super-intelligent AI gives you a slight chill, even if you’re not quite stocking up a doomsday bunker. These fears, while varied, all reflect a common theme: uncertainty. AI is a powerful, rapidly evolving technology, and as a society, we’re not entirely sure how it will fit into our values, our laws, and our everyday lives.

It’s important to note that fear often goes hand in hand with hype – we tend to fear what we don’t fully understand or can’t predict. Not every scary scenario will come to pass, and as usual, a lot of things we’re worrying about will probably never happen. In fact, AI also holds a lot of promise in areas like healthcare, education, and solving big world problems, which is why we’re charging ahead with it in the first place. But listening to these fears matters. They remind us what we care about: our dignity in work, the special spark of human creativity, and ultimately our own survival and purpose. By acknowledging what scares people about AI, we can have more honest conversations about how to shape this technology moving forward. Whether you’re an AI enthusiast or a cautious skeptic, it helps to understand the anxieties in the air. The future is coming one way or another, and it’s good to know we’re all worried about the same things and keeping an eye on it. If AI wants to destroy humanity, it will at least have trouble taking us by surprise.

Partner Spotlight: Duet Display

Work Anywhere—Seamlessly. Duet Display allows you to remotely access your Mac or Windows computer or transforms any Mac, PC, iPad, iPhone, or Android device into a second display—no dongles or adapters needed. With proprietary technology for industry-leading low latency, Duet is trusted by digital creators and enterprise users alike. Mirror, extend, or control multiple devices, and get support for all major platforms—secured by 256-bit end-to-end encryption. Frequent updates, all-software simplicity, and responsive support make Duet the go-to for remote multitasking, design, and travel productivity.

Discover more at: www.DuetDisplay.com

The Tech newsletter for Engineers who want to stay ahead

Tech moves fast, but you're still playing catch-up?

That's exactly why 100K+ engineers working at Google, Meta, and Apple read The Code twice a week.

Here's what you get:

• Curated tech news that shapes your career - Filtered from thousands of sources so you know what's coming 6 months early.

• Practical resources you can use immediately - Real tutorials and tools that solve actual engineering problems.

• Research papers and insights decoded - We break down complex tech so you understand what matters.

All delivered twice a week in just 2 short emails.

Join 100K+ engineers

Stay productive, stay curious—see you next week with more AI breakthroughs!