THE POD BAY DOORS

We’ve been well-prepped for maleficent AI by our movies, TV and books for decades now (HAL 9000, Skynet, the Cylons), but we’ve seen enough of the real thing to understand that evil AI in the here-and-now is, well, hovering in the wings. A real thing. A thing to take seriously. We can easily see what that can mean, and it now becomes our task to decide what we can do about it. The first step is figuring out what “good” and “evil” are, in AI terms, and what options we have in

The AI doomscroll is now a 24/7 thing, it looks like. Open any social media channel, day or night, and bam! AI is 1) taking all our jobs, 2) smothering all human creativity, or 3) sacrificing us by the millions to scarf up water for new data centers. And in the midst of all this teeth-gnashing we get word of an experiment by Emergence AI, a US startup that undertook to test several leading AI models to see how well they would do if put in charge of us all. In this experiment,

The state of AI in the US is precarious; it looms dark over the economy, as the forecast of 300 million jobs vanishing in 10 years enters...