Science and Technology

It strikes me as bizarre that today in the United States, a new pill to treat heartburn would have to go through months or even years of government approvals and testing before being released to the public. But the most powerful technology ever developed—capable of breaking into banks, shutting down power grids, or helping build bioweapons—can be released without even a preliminary government review.

We are having a collective failure of imagination about artificial intelligence. While many closest to the technology have issued grave warnings and urged oversight, it doesn’t seem to register as a major public concern. Congress has, of course, so far abdicated its role as lawmaker, and the Trump administration is delighted to let the industry regulate itself.

It strikes me as bizarre that today in the United States, a new pill to treat heartburn would have to go through months or even years of government approvals and testing before being released to the public. But the most powerful technology ever developed—capable of breaking into banks, shutting down power grids, or helping build bioweapons—can be released without even a preliminary government review.

We are having a collective failure of imagination about artificial intelligence. While many closest to the technology have issued grave warnings and urged oversight, it doesn’t seem to register as a major public concern. Congress has, of course, so far abdicated its role as lawmaker, and the Trump administration is delighted to let the industry regulate itself.

President Trump is right that the term “artificial intelligence” doesn’t capture the phenomenon. It is super intelligence: analytic capacity greater than that of any human and perhaps even collections of the smartest humans. We reach for analogies—the Industrial Revolution, electricity, the internet. But electricity does not get exponentially smarter every six months. The internet cannot solve mathematical problems, diagnose diseases or design new weapons.

Bad people can use these superpowers for bad purposes, but that’s not the scariest scenario. We have........

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