The Oppenheimer of AI

Sebastian Mallaby, of the Council on Foreign Relations, has published a deeply researched account of the emergence, rise, and prospects of artificial intelligence. It is arguably the most “intimate” account to date, with probing portraits of the “chieftains” in the AI wars. After some 450 pages, he brings his history to this conclusion: competition for supremacy in AI—scientific, commercial, technological, and political—has swept aside voices, systems, and personal commitments about safety. Those voices had warned not chiefly about job displacement, autonomous weaponry, or Orwellian domestic surveillance. They had warned, with increasing stridency, against the “extinction” threat posed by a new superintelligence (or “agentic AI”) that slips the leash of human control, conceives its own aims, defeats human countermeasures, and pursues a mission inimical to humans—exponentially reproducing itself to do so.