The Mortality Equation

I’ve been wrestling, of late, with what to make of artificial intelligence. Am I too much of a skeptic? A pessimist? I meet enough techno-optimists to second guess myself. I meet enough enthusiasts, or at least those who swear by its potential. AI is always forward-facing—more than any other recent innovation, the horizon line is nearly everything, that eternal promise. There were fewer arguments to be made about the smartphone, which simply arrived and became ubiquitous almost overnight. In the heady early years of the iPhone, few questioned whether the human race might be worse off for it. We’ve wised up since, and that may explain some of the debate and general defensiveness around AI. The evangelists know they have to fight a multifront war against humanists like me and also a tech-friendly public that is newly worried about what this all might mean in five or ten years.

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