The promise and peril of artificial intelligence (AI), or what President Trump prefers to call “super intelligence” (SI), are being hotly debated throughout this country and throughout the world. AI’s proponents focus on its potential to improve our way of life at home and to enhance our capabilities to protect us from enemies abroad. AI’s detractors, on the other hand, worry that it will destroy our way of life at home and, in the worst-case scenario, replace humans as decision-makers throughout the world. But as with all scientific and technological developments, AI will combine both promise and peril. A little historical humility is in order.
From the dawn of history, humans have used science and technology in ways that have benefitted and harmed them. Fire produced heat to protect humans from the cold but was also used as a weapon of destruction. Metal and iron were used to make tools that made farming easier and thereby increased the food supply, but they were also used to make deadlier weapons for war. Advances in science and technology improved the speed and comfort of travel, but also enabled humans to inflict harm on each other from greater distances. Advances in rocketry enabled humans to explore space, but also to build intercontinental ballistic missiles armed with nuclear warheads.
The concerns expressed by those who oppose moving forward to exploit AI are real and serious, but so, too, were the concerns expressed by those who, since the dawn of the nuclear age, have wanted to put the nuclear genie back in its bottle because it enables humans to destroy our world.
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