It's Time to Cry Wolf Over A.I.
(Featured image by DPI Alum Austin Irving in NYT article)
“Looks like by April, you know, in theory, when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away.”
That’s what President Trump said about the Covid-19 outbreak on Feb. 10, 2020, about a month before it forced our country and the world into a lengthy lockdown.
Why do I recall that today? Because when I think back on the biggest disaster stories I have covered — including 9/11 and Covid-19 — I am struck that they have one big thing in common: a failure of imagination. Sure, government experts prepared for these events in theory, but in practice how many of them imagined that suicidal terrorists would fly commercial airliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon? And how many imagined that a respiratory virus that emerged in Wuhan, China, would kill millions of people and drag down the world economy for years? So today, when it comes to the possibility that artificial intelligence, which is falling into the hands of rogue actors and is beginning to manifest a will of its own, could become incredibly destabilizing, my imagination is fully engaged. - Thomas L. Friedman
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