Greek prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis says job displacement from artificial intelligence will happen faster than governments and societies are prepared to manage. Speaking during a visit to San Francisco, he supported calls from frontier-lab leaders to slow development when even model builders cannot fully explain emerging behavior.
Greece is still investing in the technology. A new supercomputer in Lavrio is expected to support AI and scientific research, Microsoft is building data centers near Athens, and AWS has announced a project with the country’s largest utility in a former coal region. Mitsotakis said those facilities have not faced the level of local opposition seen elsewhere.
In education, Greece has piloted OpenAI tools to reduce teachers’ administrative work, and the prime minister sees potential in personalized tutoring. He also warned that students already use chatbots to avoid doing homework and said automation must not replace the effort required to learn basic skills.
The government plans to ban social media for children under 15 in January, yet Mitsotakis questioned whether that policy already targets an older problem as young people form relationships with AI companions. He argued that some form of regulation is inevitable but offered no finished framework, illustrating the gap between national AI investment and preparation for its social effects.