Editor’s letter

The AI vs. human score this week was roughly 1-1. A tie, sort of. On the one hand, the poor lawyer who decided to rely on AI to write a brief in the case of a man hit by an airline serving cart was laughed out of court and now must defend his law license (see Business news, p.32). On the other, a blue-ribbon group of tech leaders said that the growth of AI poses the risk of “extinction” for humanity (see The U.S. at a glance, p.7). Between these two poles—“let’s dunk on the stupid computers” and “here come the robot overlords”—lies our likely future. I’m betting against humanity’s imminent demise. For one thing, it’s been a longtime Silicon Valley obsession—the theory that we haven’t met space aliens because advanced alien civilizations have been destroyed by the AIs they created is a tech-world favorite. And it’s also something of an epic humblebrag for people like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman: “Sorry, but I think my software is so powerful it might break the world.”

I would posit that talking about the AI apocalypse is actually a kind of escape. It’s easier than talking about the ordinary anxieties we live with in the age of technology. Everybody defines AI a little bit differently. Sometimes it means human-like interactivity (think ChatGPT), sometimes the computing power for flawless deepfake video, and sometimes the ability to sift and harness massive amounts of data. But all together it’s a kind of shorthand for the next stage in the evolution of technology, and all the fears that brings up. Our world is circumscribed by phones and screens in a way unimaginable just a few years ago. Now we are on the verge of losing even the confidence of knowing when we are interacting with actual human beings. In just a few decades, we’re sweeping away millennia of experience in human relationships. That inevitably fills us with uncertainty and dread. If it didn’t, we wouldn’t be human.